Collaborative Research: SaTC: CORE: Medium: Distributed Computing in Effect: Towards Trustworthy, Resilient and Secure NextG Mobile Networks

Network security protocols and standards are crucial for the resiliency and trustworthiness of network systems. However, current practices are unable to meet the security and performance requirements of next-generation mobile network systems. For instance, existing systems primarily rely on centralized public-key infrastructure (PKI) and security functionalities, such as symmetric-key cryptography, access control, and key management, that make such systems suffer from various security vulnerabilities and system performance issues. Moreover, despite the recent post-quantum cryptography (PQC) standardization efforts, significant challenges remain unsolved for designing effective, standard-compliant security mechanisms that overcome the hurdles of centralization. The novelties of the project are to create "PKI and symmetric-key alliances" concepts for enabling distributed, standard-compliant PQC and symmetric encryption algorithms, all with enhanced side-channel resiliency. The project's broader significance is on creating innovative solutions that can achieve distributed trust, resiliency against breaches, and seamless device mobility for next-generation network systems to enhance national security. Furthermore, the project broadly offers new educational and publicly adaptable tools. The research team takes a synergistic approach to designing efficient distributed network security frameworks incorporating secure multi-party computation and decentralized architectures to address the limitations of current practices. The first thrust creates distributed NIST-PQC schemes to build compromise-resilient PKIs and scalable PQ-safe PKI alliances with certificateless credentials. The second thrust strengthens core security services by creating distributed NIST symmetric standards for breach-resilient symmetric-key alliances, forward-secure lightweight ciphers, and privacy-preserving access control frameworks. All tasks consider side-channel attacks and their countermeasures in the context of the proposed distributed schemes. The third thrust conducts a comprehensive evaluation and validation of the proposed techniques with experiments on NSF cloud infrastructures and various hardware platforms. The outreach and broadening participation activities include interdisciplinary curriculum development, and summer apprenticeships for K-12 students. The team will explore industrial partnerships for transition to practice, and build open-source platforms for reproducibility and adoption. This award reflects NSF's statutory mission and has been deemed worthy of support through evaluation using the Foundation's intellectual merit and broader impacts review criteria.