Post-Quantum User Authentication and Key Exchange Based on Consortium Blockchain

Abstract

Consortium blockchain has been widely used in many application scenarios, where there is the demand for a universal user authentication and key exchange mechanism for all the application users in the system like Know Your Customer. Since current solutions heavily rely on traditional public-key cryptosystems that are vulnerable to attacks from quantum computers, we design and implement the first post-quantum (PQ) user authentication and key exchange system for consortium blockchain, which is integrated with all the PQ public-key (i.e., signature and encryption/KEM) algorithms in the current round of NIST call for national standard. Furthermore, we also provide chaincodes, related APIs together with client codes for further development. Last but not least, we perform a systematic evaluation on the performance of the system including the consumed time of chaincodes execution and the needed on-chain storage space. Based on the experiment results, we discuss the implications of our findings, which are helpful for the PQ blockchain-based application developers, the undergoing NIST call and the developers of the PQ algorithms.