A Non-Invasive Cloud-Based Migration Strategy for Post-Quantum Cybersecurity in Smart HVAC Systems: Architecture, Implementation, and Empirical Evaluation

arXiv:2609.27828v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Legacy smart HVAC controllers rely on vendor-cloud TLS secured by ECDH and RSA, both broken by Shor's algorithm, and typical 10-15 year lifespans mean today's devices remain in service through the quantum-threat era. Direct on-device post-quantum cryptography is infeasible: an ESP32-S3, representative of capable HVAC hardware, has only 339 KB free heap against the 900 KB ML-KEM-768 requires, and even classical ECDH-P256 keygen (111.93 ms) dwarfs hardware AES-128 (0.032 ms). We propose a non-invasive PQC proxy, requiring no device, firmware, or vendor-cloud changes, performing ML-KEM-768 encapsulation and ML-DSA-65 authentication (NIST FIPS 203/204) with AES-256-GCM session keys via HKDF, implemented with Open Quantum Safe liboqs on a Raspberry Pi 4B gateway. Over 500 runs, the post-quantum handshake (Steps 1-6) completes in 2.48 ms, 0.38 ms slower than classical baseline, with PQC computation around 8% of handshake time at 20 ms simulated round-trip network latency. The gateway sustains 443 sessions/second, 100% success under 32 concurrent connections, extrapolating to 3546 sessions/second on a 32-core cloud instance. Five side-channel tests, including verified in-place session-key zeroization and a fixed-vs-random TVLA timing analysis, found no exploitable timing leakage or susceptibility to man-in-the-middle attacks. The architecture is vendor-agnostic and becomes unnecessary once vendors adopt NIST PQC natively.

Abstract:Legacy smart HVAC controllers rely on vendor-cloud TLS secured by ECDH and RSA, both broken by Shor's algorithm, and typical 10-15 year lifespans mean today's devices remain in service through the quantum-threat era. Direct on-device post-quantum cryptography is infeasible: an ESP32-S3, representative of capable HVAC hardware, has only 339 KB free heap against the 900 KB ML-KEM-768 requires, and even classical ECDH-P256 keygen (111.93 ms) dwarfs hardware AES-128 (0.032 ms). We propose a non-invasive PQC proxy, requiring no device, firmware, or vendor-cloud changes, performing ML-KEM-768 encapsulation and ML-DSA-65 authentication (NIST FIPS 203/204) with AES-256-GCM session keys via HKDF, implemented with Open Quantum Safe liboqs on a Raspberry Pi 4B gateway. Over 500 runs, the post-quantum handshake (Steps 1-6) completes in 2.48 ms, 0.38 ms slower than classical baseline, with PQC computation around 8% of handshake time at 20 ms simulated round-trip network latency. The gateway sustains 443 sessions/second, 100% success under 32 concurrent connections, extrapolating to 3546 sessions/second on a 32-core cloud instance. Five side-channel tests, including verified in-place session-key zeroization and a fixed-vs-random TVLA timing analysis, found no exploitable timing leakage or susceptibility to man-in-the-middle attacks. The architecture is vendor-agnostic and becomes unnecessary once vendors adopt NIST PQC natively.

27 pages, 12 figures (3 architecture diagrams, 9 experimental plots), 6 tables. Preprint; work in progress. Presents a non-invasive post-quantum cryptography proxy for smart HVAC systems with empirical evaluation on Raspberry Pi 4B and ESP32-S3 hardware (ML-KEM-768, ML-DSA-65, liboqs)

Cryptography and Security (cs.CR); Artificial Intelligence (cs.AI); Systems and Control (eess.SY)

arXiv:2609.27828 [cs.CR]

(or arXiv:2609.27828v1 [cs.CR] for this version)

https://doi.org/10.48550/arXiv.2609.27828 arXiv-issued DOI via DataCite (pending registration)

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A Non-Invasive Cloud-Based Migration Strategy for Post-Quantum Cybersecurity in Smart HVAC Systems: Architecture, Implementation, and Empirical Evaluation

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