Comparative study of Post-Quantum Cryptography (PQC) vs Quantum Key Distribution (QKD) in IOT ‘Smart Home’.
Author1: Neha W. Bandabuche Author2: Tanaya U. Manjre
Assistant Professor Assistant Professor
Department of Computer Science, Department of Computer Science,
Vidyabharati Mahavidyalaya , Amravati
Email: nehabandabuche2001@gmail.com Email: tmanjre@rediffmail.com
ABSTARCT
The rapid proliferation of smart home Internet of Things (IoT) technologies has transformed residential environments through intelligent automation, remote monitoring, and data driven decision making. Alongside these benefits, security risks have intensified due to advances in large scale quantum computing, which threaten the cryptographic foundations of current IoT systems. Widely deployed public key algorithms such as RSA and Elliptic Curve Cryptography are vulnerable to quantum attacks enabled by Shor’s algorithm, raising serious concerns regarding long term confidentiality, authentication, and trust in smart home ecosystems. To address this challenge, two major quantum resilient security paradigms have emerged: Post Quantum Cryptography (PQC) and Quantum Key Distribution (QKD). This paper presents a structured comparative study of PQC and QKD within smart home IoT environments, evaluating architectural compatibility, computational and energy constraints, scalability, deployment cost, communication models, and security guarantees. Realistic smart home scenarios including smart locks, surveillance cameras, and resource constrained sensor networks are examined to assess practical feasibility. The analysis demonstrates that while QKD offers information theoretic security under ideal conditions, its reliance on specialized quantum hardware and dedicated infrastructure makes it unsuitable for consumer smart homes. In contrast, PQC provides a scalable, software based, and cost effective approach that integrates seamlessly.
Keywords: Post-Quantum Cryptography, Quantum Key Distribution, Smart Home IoT, Quantum Security, IoT Cryptography.
