PHD-EE PROPOSAL DEFENSE "ON IMPLEMENTATION AND SECURITY OF POST-QUANTUM CRYPTOGRAPHY FOR IOT SYSTEMS"
Date: October 28, 2026 Time: 11:15 AM Location: EE Reading Room
Speaker: Muhammad Asim Javaid Supervisor: Dr. Muhammad Ali Siddiqi & Dr. Muhammad Adeel Pasha
Post-quantum cryptography (PQC) addresses the threat posed by quantum computers to public-key cryptography. Its deployment on resource-constrained Internet of Things (IoT) devices must balance processing, memory, energy, and communication limits with protection against implementation-level attacks. This thesis investigates PQC deployment through communication integration, computational efficiency, and implementation security.
A medical-device case study integrates Kyber and SABER key establishment over near-field communication (NFC) to protect Bluetooth Low Energy (BLE) application data without modifying the BLE stack. An ESP32-S3 and smartphone prototype demonstrates feasibility and identifies communication as the dominant contributor to exchange latency.
For computational efficiency, a binary Ring-LWE implementation on an ARM Cortex-M33 combines packed arithmetic, an optimized message codec, and buffered hardware randomness. The implementation achieves speedups of 4.06×, 3.35×, and 3.01× for key generation, encryption, and decryption, respectively, relative to a scalar baseline before hardening. Implementation security is examined through branch-free execution, redundant verification, and first-order masking, supported by compiled-code inspection, timing measurements, power-leakage tests, and logical fault injection.
The proposed research extends this work to real-time operating systems (RTOS), investigating whether scheduling, context switching, and task isolation expose sensitive PQC state under Micrium OS on the EFM32PG28. Controlled hardware experiments will assess side-channel leakage, sensitive-state persistence in registers and memory, and access across task boundaries. Targeted countermeasures will be evaluated for security effectiveness, correctness, and resource and real-time costs.
Together, these studies aim to inform efficient and secure PQC deployment on constrained embedded platforms, including the effects of operating-system execution on cryptographic security.
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Date: October 28, 2026
Time: 11:15 AM
Location: EE Reading Room
Speaker: Muhammad Asim Javaid
Supervisor: Dr. Muhammad Ali Siddiqi & Dr. Muhammad Adeel Pasha