The Internet of Things (IoT) refers to the vision of a global network of physical objects (i.e. "things") equipped with computing and wireless communication capabilities that enable them to be uniquely identified or even exchange data with other connected devices. RFID tags and wireless sensor nodes constitute the first wave of such non-traditional computing devices that will soon populate the Internet ecosystem in vast quantities. An ever-increasing number of everyday objects, ranging from kitchen appliances over items of clothing and sports goods to cars and other vehicles, become equipped with microprocessors and wireless transceivers, which enables them to communicate with each other and access central resources over the Internet. In a recent white paper, Cisco estimates the number of smart objects connected to the Internet to exceed 50 billion in 2020. This evolution of the Internet will change the way how we interact with the physical world surrounding us and create exciting new opportunities for the economy in such areas as health care, industrial automation, resource management, and transportation and logistics, to name a few.

The advent of quantum computing is another technological revolution that will soon have a profound impact on our daily life and may even disrupt whole industries. In the not so distant future, quantum computers will be powerful enough to aid the discovery of new drugs or materials, to organize the routes of millions of self-driving cars in metropolitan areas without introducing traffic jams, or to manage and improve the efficiency of national power grids. Unfortunately, quantum computing has also a destructive side because a large-scale quantum computer would be able to break essentially every public-key cryptosystem in use today, in particular RSA and ECC. However, there exist a few public-key cryptographic algorithms that are unbreakable not only for classical computers, but also when using a sophisticated quantum computer. The sub-area of cryptography that deals with the design, cryptanalysis, and implementation of cryptographic algorithms supposed to be able to withstand attacks by quantum computers is known as Post-Quantum Cryptography (PQC) and has recently gained a lot of interest, especially after the NIST announced an initiative to standardize quantum-safe cryptographic algorithms.

The project QUASIKOM ("Post-Quantum Secure Communication for the Internet of Things") lies thematically at the intersection of these two technological revolutions and aims to make the IoT resistant against cryptanalytic attacks with a quantum computer. More concretely, the goal of QUASIKOM is to develop a post-quantum secure version of the Datagram Transport Layer Security (DTLS) protocol, which is the de-facto standard for end-to-end authentication and encryption in the IoT. It is also planned to implement a prototype of such a "hardened" DTLS protocol, whereby the open-source software TinyDTLS will be used as a starting point. TinyDTLS is aimed at resource-constrained IoT devices equipped with an 8, 16, or 32-bit microcontroller that is clocked with a frequency of a few MHz. The main task of the project is to implement an NTRU-based key establishment mechanism and its integration into TinyDTLS to replace the currently used RSA-based key transport and Diffie-Hellman key exchange, which can both be broken with a quantum computer. NTRU is a well-studied lattice-based cryptosystem that combines high computational efficiency with relatively short key lengths, which makes it well suited for the IoT. To date (as of October 2017), the performance-critical arithmetic operations of NTRU already exist in both C and Assembly language.

The QUASIKOM project is supported by Netidee.