Problem
Research questions and friction points this paper is trying to address.
quantum threat
Harvest Now Decrypt Later
banking transaction security
post-quantum cryptography
cryptographic infrastructure
Quantum-Resilient Banking Transaction Security using DW-HKEM: A Hybrid RSA/ML-KEM Cryptographic Gateway with Real-Time
🤖 AI Summary
This work addresses the “harvest now, decrypt later” (HNDL) threat posed by quantum computing to RSA-based encryption by proposing a dual-wrapped hybrid key encapsulation mechanism (DW-HKEM). The scheme uniquely integrates classical RSA-256 with the post-quantum secure ML-KEM-768, leveraging SHA-256 to derive a composite key that protects AES-256 session keys. Designed to ensure both classical and quantum-era security, DW-HKEM maintains compatibility with existing financial infrastructure and is accompanied by CryptoX, a real-time cryptographic analytics dashboard. Empirical evaluation demonstrates an average additional latency of only 1.58 ms, confirming its enterprise-grade performance, scalability, and seamless migration potential, thereby offering the banking sector a practical quantum-resistant encryption gateway solution.
📝 Abstract
The increasing number of online banking and financial services on public-facing networks has caused security of cryptographic protocols to become a serious, systemic problem. RSA-2048 is the key length that is used in the majority of transactions that travel over the Internet every day. A very insidious threat vector, the Harvest Now, Decrypt Later (HNDL) paradigm, is already in existence with the adversarial nation-state actors and well-funded threat actors. The exposure window is not a time in the future it is the NOW moment! Quantum computation is a certain threat to the current public-key cryptographic infrastructure, and one that is moving ever closer. In this paper, the authors take up both of these challenges, designing, implementing and testing an integrated system based on a Dual-Wrap Hybrid Key Encapsulation Mechanism (DW-HKEM) and a live cryptographic analytics dashboard. Both the RSA-256 and ML-KEM-768 are hosted within the DW-HKEM framework and an AES-256 session key is wrapped in each of them, with a composite key created using a Key Derivation Function based on SHA-256, resulting in combinatorial security against classical and quantum adversaries and backwards compatibility with existing banking systems. The CryptoX real-time dashboard offers time tracking for each operation, session-level analytics and visualization of performance trends for immediate use in enterprise banking security operations. The results from empirical benchmarking across 100 independent iterations show a total overhead of about 1.58ms, which is well within the enterprise deployment threshold, proving the architecture viable as a practical, scalable reference for the financial-sector's cryptographic infrastructure and applications to move to a post-quantum era. We also provide complete source code of the work carried out.
Innovation
Methods, ideas, or system contributions that make the work stand out.
DW-HKEM
Hybrid Cryptography
Post-Quantum Security
ML-KEM
Real-Time Crypto Analytics
🔎 Similar Papers
No similar papers found.
