Daniel J. Bernstein (University of Illinois at Chicago and Academia Sinica), Tanja Lange (Eindhoven University of Technology amd Academia Sinica), Jonathan Levin (Academia Sinica and Eindhoven University of Technology), Bo-Yin Yang (Academia Sinica)

This paper introduces PQConnect, a post-quantum end-to-end tunneling protocol that automatically protects all packets between clients that have installed PQConnect and servers that have installed and configured PQConnect.

Like VPNs, PQConnect does not require any changes to higher-level protocols and application software. PQConnect adds cryptographic protection to unencrypted applications, works in concert with existing pre-quantum applications to add post-quantum protection, and adds a second application-independent layer of defense to any applications that have begun to incorporate application-specific post-quantum protection.

Unlike VPNs, PQConnect automatically creates end-to-end tunnels to any number of servers using automatic peer discovery, with no need for the client administrator to configure per-server information. Each server carries out a client-independent configuration step to publish an announcement that the server's name accepts PQConnect connections. Any PQConnect client connecting to that name efficiently finds this announcement, automatically establishes a post-quantum point-to-point IP tunnel to the server, and routes traffic for that name through that tunnel.

The foundation of security in PQConnect is the server's long-term public key used to encrypt and authenticate all PQConnect packets. PQConnect makes a conservative choice of post-quantum KEM for this public key. PQConnect also uses a smaller post-quantum KEM for forward secrecy, and elliptic curves to ensure pre-quantum security even in case of security failures in KEM design or KEM software. Security of the handshake component of PQConnect has been symbolically proven using Tamarin.

View More Papers

You Can Rand but You Can't Hide: A Holistic...

Inon Kaplan (Independent researcher), Ron even (Independent researcher), Amit Klein (The Hebrew University of Jerusalem, Israel)

Read More

SketchFeature: High-Quality Per-Flow Feature Extractor Towards Security-Aware Data Plane

Sian Kim (Ewha Womans University), Seyed Mohammad Mehdi Mirnajafizadeh (Wayne State University), Bara Kim (Korea University), Rhongho Jang (Wayne State University), DaeHun Nyang (Ewha Womans University)

Read More

Try to Poison My Deep Learning Data? Nowhere to...

Yansong Gao (The University of Western Australia), Huaibing Peng (Nanjing University of Science and Technology), Hua Ma (CSIRO's Data61), Zhi Zhang (The University of Western Australia), Shuo Wang (Shanghai Jiao Tong University), Rayne Holland (CSIRO's Data61), Anmin Fu (Nanjing University of Science and Technology), Minhui Xue (CSIRO's Data61), Derek Abbott (The University of Adelaide, Australia)

Read More

ReThink: Reveal the Threat of Electromagnetic Interference on Power...

Fengchen Yang (Zhejiang University; ZJU QI-ANXIN IoT Security Joint Labratory), Zihao Dan (Zhejiang University; ZJU QI-ANXIN IoT Security Joint Labratory), Kaikai Pan (Zhejiang University; ZJU QI-ANXIN IoT Security Joint Labratory), Chen Yan (Zhejiang University; ZJU QI-ANXIN IoT Security Joint Labratory), Xiaoyu Ji (Zhejiang University; ZJU QI-ANXIN IoT Security Joint Labratory), Wenyuan Xu (Zhejiang University; ZJU…

Read More