International Journal of Science, Engineering and TechnologyAuthors: Karishma Dobhal, Y.P. Raiwani
Abstract: Classical public-key cryptography, mainly RSA, is at risk from the emergence of quantum computers. A complete shift to Post-Quantum Cryptography (PQC) faces vulnerabilities due to implementation and trust issues, despite NIST's approval of standards such as ML-KEM (Kyber). This paper presented a performance and bandwidth trade-off study of a proposed Hybrid Key Encapsulation Mechanism that fused the NIST-standardized ML-KEM-768 (FIPS 203) with the traditional RSA-3072. Two separate secret keys S1 and S2 were produced and encapsulated utilizing both classical and post-quantum public keys in our dual-layered model. In order to create a strong session key that ensures trust transition and backward compatibility with current network infrastructures, these secrets were then combined using a Hybrid Key Derivation Function (HKDF). In comparison to standalone systems, the study assessed the computational cost and communication latency brought about by this hybrid overhead. According to experimental data, the hybrid architecture offers a crucial security fail-safe against both classical flaws and future quantum threats without prohibitively high performance, even though it increases ciphertext size.
DOI: http://doi.org/10.5281/zenodo.21715795
