Post Quantum Design in SPDM for Device Authentication and Key Establishment

Abstract

The Security Protocol and Data Model (SPDM) defines a set of flows whose purpose includes the authentication of a computing device’s hardware identity. SPDM also allows for the creation of a secure session wherein data communication between two devices has both confidentiality and integrity protection. The present version of SPDM, namely version 1.2, relies upon traditional asymmetric cryptographic algorithms, and these algorithms are known to be vulnerable to quantum attacks. This paper describes the means by which support for post-quantum (PQ) cryptography can be added to the SPDM protocol in order to prepare SPDM for the upcoming world of quantum computing. As part of this paper, we examine the SPDM 1.2 protocol and discuss various aspects of using PQC algorithms, including negotiation of the use of post-quantum cryptography (PQC) algorithms, support for device identity reporting, mechanisms for device authentication, and establishing a secure session. We consider so-called “hybrid modes’’ where both classical and PQC algorithms are used to achieve security properties, especially given the fact that these modes are important during the transition period from the classical to the quantum computing regime. We also share our experience with implementing a software embodiment of PQC in SPDM, namely “PQ-SPDM’’, and we provide benchmarks that evaluate a subset of the winning NIST PQC algorithms.

When Cryptography Needs a Hand: Practical Post-Quantum Authentication for V2V Communications

“…Prior works on PQC in embedded systems and wireless networks are more closely related to our work on V2V. However, many existing works on embedded systems (e.g., [23], [24], [25], [26], [27]) do not consider the above constraints; for wireless systems, PQC has mostly been considered only for key exchange or encryption (in contrast to our focus on authentication) as in [19] (PQ key establishment protocols to encrypt 5G identifiers) and [73] (encryption for video streaming systems). In the vehicular domain, PQC is scantly represented.…”

“…We denote the i-th message by BSM i and its signature by sig i , packed into spdu i . The first stage (lines 3-11) and last stage (lines [25][26][27][28][29][30][31] are the same as for the ECDSA-based design conditioned on the Boolean value b c . This value is 1 if the entire hybrid certificate has been received and verified by the receiver within the five minutes that the pseudonym certificate has been used, (i.e., b c is set to 1 in line 18).…”

“…1. Moreover, we focus on the particular challenges of authenticating V2V message broadcasts over noisy wireless channels, whereas existing hybrid designs in embedded or vehicular systems tend to focus on confidentiality or access control [18], [19], [20], [21], [22], or else consider reliable, wired channels with bidirectional communication [23], [24], [25], [26], [27].…”

“…Roadmap for a PQ Transition in V2V: We show that simply adopting a hybrid design using any of the PQ signature schemes selected for NIST standardization [28] or the 0 1000 500 Latency constraint (ms) Size constraint (bytes) 10 0 100 1000 10000 100000 [30] [31] [32] V2V 6G [19] SPDM [25] TLS Fig. 1.…”

Light-Weight Security Protocol and Data Model for Chip-to-Chip Zero-Trust

“…The SPDM relies on asymmetric cryptography and public-key certificates for authentication. A post-quantum design is proposed in [30].…”