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Hybrid authenticated key exchange combines cryptography key material from different sources (classical, quantum and post-quantum cryptography) to build protocols that are resilient to catastrophic failures, technology advances and future cryptanalytic attacks. In this work, we propose and implement a triple-hybrid version of the transport layer security network protocol TLS 1.3, combining classical and post-quantum cryptography, and quantum key distribution. We evaluate the performance of this triple-hybrid TLS in an experimental network scenario and our analysis shows that the quantum-resistant feature comes at an increased communication cost of approximately 68 % over the total time of the composite handshakes. In exchange, our solution is an enhancement to the TLS 1.3 protocol by adding quantum-resistant cryptography schemes.

The appearance of quantum computing in the short foreseeable future and its capability to break conventional cryptographic algorithms forces to change the paradigm of secure real-time communications. Thus, government organizations, data centers, and enterprises among others are migrating their public key infrastructure towards using post-quantum cryptography (PQC) algorithms in order to mitigate the security threats posed by quantum computers. This letter presents the first quantum resilient secure end-to-end communication link based on PQC algorithms operating between two data-processing units DPU. Both data-processing units employ on-board ARM processors to perform the computationally expensive cryptographic building blocks—in that case CRYSTALS-Kyber as a key encapsulation mechanism and CRYSTALS-Dilithium for digital signature scheme in combination with advanced encryption standard with 256-bit key.