Key Exchange in the Quantum Era: Evaluating a Hybrid System of Public-Key Cryptography and Physical-Layer Security

Abstract: Today's information society relies on cryptography to achieve security goals such as confidentiality, integrity, authentication, and non-repudiation for digital communications. Here, public-key cryptosystems play a pivotal role to share encryption keys and create digital signatures. However, quantum computers threaten the security of traditional public-key cryptosystems as they can tame computational problems underlying the schemes, i.e., discrete logarithm and integer factorization. The prospective arrival of capable-enough quantum computers already threatens today's secret communication in terms of their long-term secrecy when stored to be later decrypted. Therefore, researchers strive to develop and deploy alternative schemes. In this work, evaluate a key exchange protocol based on combining public-key schemes with physical-layer security, anticipating the prospect of quantum attacks. If powerful quantum attackers cannot immediately obtain private keys, legitimate parties have a window of short-term secrecy to perform a physical-layer jamming key exchange (JKE) to establish a long-term shared secret. Thereby, the protocol constraints the computation time available to the attacker to break the employed public-key cryptography. In this paper, we outline the protocol, discuss its security, and point out challenges to be resolved.