Empowering Mobile Networks Security Resilience by using Post-Quantum Cryptography
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arXiv
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| Format: | Preprint |
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2026
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| _version_ | 1866912989079142400 |
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| author | Faval, Ricardo Alves Moreira, Rodrigo Silva, Flávio de Oliveira |
| author_facet | Faval, Ricardo Alves Moreira, Rodrigo Silva, Flávio de Oliveira |
| contents | The transition to a cloud-native 5G Service-Based Architecture (SBA) improves scalability but exposes control-plane signaling to emerging quantum threats, including Harvest-Now, Decrypt-Later (HNDL) attacks. While NIST has standardized post-quantum cryptography (PQC), practical, deployable integration in operational 5G cores remains underexplored. This work experimentally integrates NIST-standardized ML-KEM-768 and ML-DSA into an open-source 5G core (free5GC) using a sidecar proxy pattern that preserves unmodified network functions (NFs). Implemented on free5GC, we compare three deployments: (i) native HTTPS/TLS, (ii) TLS sidecar, and (iii) PQC-enabled sidecar. Measurements at the HTTP/2 request-response boundary over repeated independent runs show that PQC increases end-to-end Service-Based Interface (SBI) latency to approximately 54 ms, adding a deterministic 48-49 ms overhead relative to the classical baseline, while maintaining tightly bounded variance (IQR <= 0.2 ms, CV < 0.4%). We also quantify the impact of Certification Authority (CA) security levels, identifying certificate validation as a tunable contributor to overall delay. Overall, the results demonstrate that sidecar-based PQC insertion enables a non-disruptive and operationally predictable migration path for quantum-resilient 5G signaling. |
| format | Preprint |
| id |
arxiv_https___arxiv_org_abs_2603_28626 |
| institution | arXiv |
| publishDate | 2026 |
| record_format | arxiv |
| spellingShingle | Empowering Mobile Networks Security Resilience by using Post-Quantum Cryptography Faval, Ricardo Alves Moreira, Rodrigo Silva, Flávio de Oliveira Cryptography and Security The transition to a cloud-native 5G Service-Based Architecture (SBA) improves scalability but exposes control-plane signaling to emerging quantum threats, including Harvest-Now, Decrypt-Later (HNDL) attacks. While NIST has standardized post-quantum cryptography (PQC), practical, deployable integration in operational 5G cores remains underexplored. This work experimentally integrates NIST-standardized ML-KEM-768 and ML-DSA into an open-source 5G core (free5GC) using a sidecar proxy pattern that preserves unmodified network functions (NFs). Implemented on free5GC, we compare three deployments: (i) native HTTPS/TLS, (ii) TLS sidecar, and (iii) PQC-enabled sidecar. Measurements at the HTTP/2 request-response boundary over repeated independent runs show that PQC increases end-to-end Service-Based Interface (SBI) latency to approximately 54 ms, adding a deterministic 48-49 ms overhead relative to the classical baseline, while maintaining tightly bounded variance (IQR <= 0.2 ms, CV < 0.4%). We also quantify the impact of Certification Authority (CA) security levels, identifying certificate validation as a tunable contributor to overall delay. Overall, the results demonstrate that sidecar-based PQC insertion enables a non-disruptive and operationally predictable migration path for quantum-resilient 5G signaling. |
| title | Empowering Mobile Networks Security Resilience by using Post-Quantum Cryptography |
| topic | Cryptography and Security |
| url | https://arxiv.org/abs/2603.28626 |