Quantum-Safe Code Auditing: LLM-Assisted Static Analysis and Quantum-Aware Risk Scoring for Post-Quantum Cryptography Migration
This addresses the critical security challenge of quantum threats for software developers and organizations, though it is incremental as it builds on existing static analysis and LLM techniques.
The paper tackles the problem of migrating software to post-quantum cryptography by developing a quantum-aware static analysis framework that detects quantum-vulnerable cryptographic primitives and prioritizes migration based on risk scoring, achieving 71.98% precision and 100% recall on a sample of 602 labelled instances.
The impending arrival of cryptographically relevant quantum computers (CRQCs) threatens the security foundations of modern software: Shor's algorithm breaks RSA, ECDSA, ECDH, and Diffie-Hellman, while Grover's algorithm reduces the effective security of symmetric and hash-based schemes. Despite NIST standardising post-quantum cryptography (PQC) in 2024 (FIPS 203 ML-KEM, FIPS 204 ML-DSA, FIPS 205 SLH-DSA), most codebases lack automated tooling to inventory classical cryptographic usage and prioritise migration based on quantum risk. We present Quantum-Safe Code Auditor, a quantum-aware static analysis framework that combines (i) regex-based detection of 15 classes of quantum-vulnerable primitives, (ii) LLM-assisted contextual enrichment to classify usage and severity, and (iii) risk scoring via a Variational Quantum Eigensolver (VQE) model implemented in Qiskit 2.x, incorporating qubit-cost estimates to prioritise findings. We evaluate the system across five open-source libraries -- python-rsa, python-ecdsa, python-jose, node-jsonwebtoken, and Bouncy Castle Java -- covering 5,775 findings. On a stratified sample of 602 labelled instances, we achieve 71.98% precision, 100% recall, and an F1 score of 83.71%. All code, data, and reproduction scripts are released as open-source.