Post Quantum Secure Command and Control of Mobile Agents : Inserting quantum-resistant encryption schemes in the Secure Robot Operating System
This addresses security vulnerabilities in aerospace and defense applications for mobile agents, but is incremental as it applies existing quantum-resistant techniques to a new system.
The paper tackled the problem of securing command and control for mobile agents against quantum computing threats by integrating post-quantum encryption schemes into the Robot Operating System, resulting in performance comparisons with current methods like RSA.
The secure command and control (C&C) of mobile agents arises in various settings including unmanned aerial vehicles, single pilot operations in commercial settings, and mobile robots to name a few. As more and more of these applications get integrated into aerospace and defense use cases, the security of the communication channel between the ground station and the mobile agent is of increasing importance. The development of quantum computing devices poses a unique threat to secure communications due to the vulnerability of asymmetric ciphers to Shor's algorithm. Given the active development of new quantum resistant encryption techniques, we report the first integration of post-quantum secure encryption schemes with the robot operating system (ROS) and C&C of mobile agents, in general. We integrate these schemes in the application and network layers, and study the performance of these methods by comparing them to present day security schemes such as the widely used RSA algorithm.