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Post-Quantum Hybrid Digital Signatures with Hardware-Support for Digital Twins

Saif E. Nouma, Attila A. Yavuz

TL;DR

This work tackles the challenge of authenticating data in Digital Twins under post-quantum threats while remaining feasible for resource-constrained IoT devices. It introduces Hardware-Assisted Signatures (HASES), centered on a Commitment Construct Oracle (CCO) that delivers expensive commitments non-interactively to verifiers, enabling light signer workloads. Three instantiations—PQ-HASES (PQ+FS), LA-HASES (aggregate EC-based), and HY-HASES (hybrid nesting of the two)—achieve forward security, PQ security, and aggregation within standard cryptographic primitives, with formal ROM-based security proofs. The authors provide extensive performance evaluations on commodity hardware and 8-bit MCUs, showing significant signer-time reductions, compact signatures, and favorable verifier storage when compared to state-of-the-art PQ, aggregate, and hybrid schemes, and they release open-source implementations. Overall, HASES offers a practical, standards-conformant transitional path for secure, scalable, and quantum-safe DT ecosystems.

Abstract

Digital Twins (DT) virtually model cyber-physical objects using Internet of Things (IoT) components (e.g., sensors) to gather and process senstive information stored in the cloud. Trustworthiness of the streamed data is crucial which requires quantum safety and breach resiliency. Digital signatures are essential for scalable authentication and non-repudiation. Yet, NIST PQC signature standards are exorbitantly costly for low-end IoT without considering forward security. Moreover, Post-Quantum (PQ) signatures lack aggregation, which is highly desirable to reduce the transmission and storage burdens in DTs. Hence, there is an urgent need for lightweight digital signatures that offer compromise resiliency and compactness while permitting an effective transition into the PQ era for DTs. We create a series of highly lightweight digital signatures called Hardware-ASsisted Efficient Signature (HASES) that meets the above requirements. The core of HASES is a hardware-assisted cryptographic commitment construct oracle (CCO) that permits verifiers to obtain expensive commitments without signer interaction. We created three HASES schemes: PQ-HASES is a forward-secure PQ signature, LA-HASES is an efficient aggregate Elliptic-Curve signature, and HY-HASES is a novel hybrid scheme that combines PQ-HASES and LA-HASES with novel strong nesting and sequential aggregation. HASES does not require a secure-hardware on the signer. We proved that HASES schemes are secure and implemented them on commodity hardware and an 8-bit AVR ATmega2560. Our experiments confirm that PQ-HASES and LA-HASES are two magnitudes of times more signer efficient than their PQ and conventional-secure counterparts, respectively. HY-HASES outperforms NIST PQC and conventional signature combinations, offering a standardcompliant transitional solution for emerging DTs. We open-source HASES schemes for public testing and adaptation.

Post-Quantum Hybrid Digital Signatures with Hardware-Support for Digital Twins

TL;DR

This work tackles the challenge of authenticating data in Digital Twins under post-quantum threats while remaining feasible for resource-constrained IoT devices. It introduces Hardware-Assisted Signatures (HASES), centered on a Commitment Construct Oracle (CCO) that delivers expensive commitments non-interactively to verifiers, enabling light signer workloads. Three instantiations—PQ-HASES (PQ+FS), LA-HASES (aggregate EC-based), and HY-HASES (hybrid nesting of the two)—achieve forward security, PQ security, and aggregation within standard cryptographic primitives, with formal ROM-based security proofs. The authors provide extensive performance evaluations on commodity hardware and 8-bit MCUs, showing significant signer-time reductions, compact signatures, and favorable verifier storage when compared to state-of-the-art PQ, aggregate, and hybrid schemes, and they release open-source implementations. Overall, HASES offers a practical, standards-conformant transitional path for secure, scalable, and quantum-safe DT ecosystems.

Abstract

Digital Twins (DT) virtually model cyber-physical objects using Internet of Things (IoT) components (e.g., sensors) to gather and process senstive information stored in the cloud. Trustworthiness of the streamed data is crucial which requires quantum safety and breach resiliency. Digital signatures are essential for scalable authentication and non-repudiation. Yet, NIST PQC signature standards are exorbitantly costly for low-end IoT without considering forward security. Moreover, Post-Quantum (PQ) signatures lack aggregation, which is highly desirable to reduce the transmission and storage burdens in DTs. Hence, there is an urgent need for lightweight digital signatures that offer compromise resiliency and compactness while permitting an effective transition into the PQ era for DTs. We create a series of highly lightweight digital signatures called Hardware-ASsisted Efficient Signature (HASES) that meets the above requirements. The core of HASES is a hardware-assisted cryptographic commitment construct oracle (CCO) that permits verifiers to obtain expensive commitments without signer interaction. We created three HASES schemes: PQ-HASES is a forward-secure PQ signature, LA-HASES is an efficient aggregate Elliptic-Curve signature, and HY-HASES is a novel hybrid scheme that combines PQ-HASES and LA-HASES with novel strong nesting and sequential aggregation. HASES does not require a secure-hardware on the signer. We proved that HASES schemes are secure and implemented them on commodity hardware and an 8-bit AVR ATmega2560. Our experiments confirm that PQ-HASES and LA-HASES are two magnitudes of times more signer efficient than their PQ and conventional-secure counterparts, respectively. HY-HASES outperforms NIST PQC and conventional signature combinations, offering a standardcompliant transitional solution for emerging DTs. We open-source HASES schemes for public testing and adaptation.
Paper Structure (18 sections, 3 theorems, 5 equations, 8 figures, 3 tables)

This paper contains 18 sections, 3 theorems, 5 equations, 8 figures, 3 tables.

Table of Contents

  1. Introduction
  2. Related Work and Limitations of the State-of-the-Art
  3. Our Contribution
  4. Preliminaries
  5. Models
  6. System Model
  7. Threat and Security Model
  8. Proposed Schemes
  9. Post-Quantum Hardware-Assisted Efficient Signatures (PQ-HASES)
  10. Lightweight Aggregate Hardware-Assisted Efficient Signatures (LA-HASES)
  11. HYbrid Hardware-ASsisted Efficient Signatures (HY-HASES)
  12. Security Analysis
  13. Performance Analysis
  14. Evaluation Metrics and Experimental Setup
  15. Performance Evaluation and Comparison
  16. ...and 3 more sections

Key Result

Theorem 1

If a polynomial-time adversary $\mathcal{A}$ can break the $$F-EU-CMA secure $$PQ-HASES in time $t$ and after $q_s$ signature and commitment queries, and $q_s'$ queries to $$RO(.), with a break-in query, then one can build polynomial-time algorithm $\mathcal{F}$ that breaks the EU-CMA secure $$HORS $\text{,~where } q'_s = q_s+1 \text{ ~and~ } \mathcal{O}(t')=\mathcal{O}(t) + k \cdot H_0$

Figures (8)

  • Figure 1: The proposed PQ hardware-assisted digital signature with forward-security ($$PQ-HASES)
  • Figure 2: High-level description of the $$PQ-HASES scheme
  • Figure 3: The proposed lightweight aggregate-based hardware-assisted digital signature ($$LA-HASES)
  • Figure 4: High-level description of the $$LA-HASES scheme
  • Figure 5: High-level description of $$HY-HASES signature generation algorithm
  • ...and 3 more figures

Theorems & Definitions (14)

  • Definition 1
  • Definition 2
  • Definition 3
  • Definition 4
  • Definition 5
  • Definition 6
  • Definition 7
  • Definition 8
  • Theorem 1
  • Theorem 2
  • ...and 4 more