Logo
ScienceStack
Table of Contents
Fetching ...
Sign In

On the Energy Cost of Post-Quantum Key Establishment in Wireless Low-Power Personal Area Networks

Tao Liu, Gowri Ramachandra, Raja Jurdak

TL;DR

This work separates computation and communication costs using Bluetooth Low Energy as a representative platform and validates them on real hardware, showing communication often dominates PQKE energy, exceeding cryptographic cost.

Abstract

Post-Quantum Cryptography (PQC) creates payloads that strain the timing and energy budgets of Personal Area Networks. In post-quantum key exchange (PQKE), this causes severe fragmentation, prolonged radio activity, and high transmission overhead on low-power devices. Prior work optimizes cryptographic computation but largely ignores communication cost. This paper separates computation and communication costs using Bluetooth Low Energy as a representative platform and validates them on real hardware. Results show communication often dominates PQKE energy, exceeding cryptographic cost. Efficient quantum-resilient pairing therefore requires coordinated protocol configuration and lower-layer optimization. This work provides developers a practical way to reason about PQC energy trade-offs and informs the evolution of PAN standards toward quantum-safe operation.

On the Energy Cost of Post-Quantum Key Establishment in Wireless Low-Power Personal Area Networks

TL;DR

This work separates computation and communication costs using Bluetooth Low Energy as a representative platform and validates them on real hardware, showing communication often dominates PQKE energy, exceeding cryptographic cost.

Abstract

Post-Quantum Cryptography (PQC) creates payloads that strain the timing and energy budgets of Personal Area Networks. In post-quantum key exchange (PQKE), this causes severe fragmentation, prolonged radio activity, and high transmission overhead on low-power devices. Prior work optimizes cryptographic computation but largely ignores communication cost. This paper separates computation and communication costs using Bluetooth Low Energy as a representative platform and validates them on real hardware. Results show communication often dominates PQKE energy, exceeding cryptographic cost. Efficient quantum-resilient pairing therefore requires coordinated protocol configuration and lower-layer optimization. This work provides developers a practical way to reason about PQC energy trade-offs and informs the evolution of PAN standards toward quantum-safe operation.
Paper Structure (27 sections, 4 equations, 3 figures, 2 tables)

This paper contains 27 sections, 4 equations, 3 figures, 2 tables.

Table of Contents

  1. Introduction
  2. Background and Related Work
  3. Review on PQC Migration
  4. Prior Work on Quantum-Safe IoT
  5. Benchmarking PQC for Embedded Systems
  6. System-level PQC Integration
  7. Hardware Acceleration for Quantum-Resilient IoT
  8. Quantum Threats and Security Countermeasures
  9. Energy Modeling and Measurement
  10. Theoretical Modeling
  11. Empirical Measurement
  12. Experimental Setup
  13. Empirical Measurement of $E_{\mathrm{comp}}$
  14. Empirical Measurement of $E_{\mathrm{comm}}$
  15. PQKE Energy Cost Breakdown
  16. ...and 12 more sections

Figures (3)

  • Figure 1: Theoretical (dashed) vs. empirical (solid) computation energy for ML-KEM key generation and decapsulation. +% labels indicate the fraction of secondary cost over empirical.
  • Figure 2: PQKE energy cost across BLE configurations, with computation–communication breakdown and DLE comparison.
  • Figure 3: Total session energy for transmitting a 1 kB payload under different classic and quantum-safe security configurations.