Integração de criptografia pós-quântica no protocolo ACME no contexto de dispositivos IoT baseados em Linux

Abstract

Currently, there is a growing use of IoT devices and other low-power embedded systems. This enables many applications to become connected to the Internet, such as household appliances. However, the security of these connections still faces challenges, especially due to the lack of automated mechanisms for secure certificate management and encrypted communications. The ACME (Automatic Certificate Management Environment) protocol emerges as a viable solution, as it allows the automated issuance and renewal of digital certificates. Nevertheless, the imminent advent of quantum computing threatens the cryptographic algorithms currently in use, such as RSA and ECDSA, compromising the security of these systems. Post-quantum cryptography (PQC) aims to address this issue by employing algorithms based on mathematical problems resistant to quantum attacks. Even so, integrating PQC into IoT devices is challenging due to constraints related to performance, memory, and energy consumption. In this context, this work proposes the integration of post-quantum algorithms into the ACME protocol, using open-source libraries such as liboqs from the Open Quantum Safe Project, and conducting benchmarks in the context of resource-constrained devices, contributing to proactive preparedness against potential quantum threats. The implementation presented several challenges, but the results showed that MAYO-1 is comparable to RSA in certificate issuance times under favorable network conditions, although it suffers performance degradation with 5% network packet loss due to the large number of bytes in its messages.