Score: 0

Obfuscated Quantum and Post-Quantum Cryptography

Published: August 11, 2025 | arXiv ID: 2508.07635v1

By: Anju Rani , Xiaoyu Ai , Aman Gupta and more

Potential Business Impact:

Makes secret messages unhackable, even from future computers.

In this work, we present an experimental deployment of a new design for combined quantum key distribution (QKD) and post-quantum cryptography (PQC). Novel to our system is the dynamic obfuscation of the QKD-PQC sequence of operations, the number of operations, and parameters related to the operations; coupled to the integration of a GPS-free quantum synchronization protocol within the QKD process. We compare the performance and overhead of our QKD-PQC system relative to a standard QKD system with one-time pad encryption, demonstrating that our design can operate in real time with little additional overhead caused by the new security features. Since our system can offer additional defensive strategies against a wide spectrum of practical attacks that undermine deployed QKD, PQC, and certain combinations of these two primitives, we suggest that our design represents one of the most secure communication systems currently available. Given the dynamic nature of its obfuscation attributes, our new system can also be adapted in the field to defeat yet-to-be-discovered practical attacks.

Page Count
13 pages

Category
Physics:
Quantum Physics