First end-to-end PQC protected DPU-to-DPU communications

The appearance of quantum computing in the short foreseeable future and its capability to break conventional cryptographic algorithms forces to change the paradigm of secure real-time communications. Thus, government organizations, data centers, and enterprises among others are migrating their public key infrastructure towards using post-quantum cryptography (PQC) algorithms in order to mitigate the security threats posed by quantum computers. This letter presents the first quantum resilient secure end-to-end communication link based on PQC algorithms operating between two data-processing units DPU. Both data-processing units employ on-board ARM processors to perform the computationally expensive cryptographic building blocks-in that case CRYSTALS-Kyber as a key encapsulation mechanism and CRYSTALS-Dilithium for digital signature scheme in combination with advanced encryption standard with 256-bit key. This letter presents the first post-quantum link between data processing units. It uses the quantum resilient algorithms Dilihtium and Kyber for authentication and key exchange respectively and AES-256 for encrypting application data.image