Paper (S44) Post-Quantum Authentication in Enterprise and Mobile Networks
slides-pqws-s44-00

Tirumaleswar Reddy.K, Hannes Tschofenig (Nokia / Univ. Bundeswehr Munich)

Most work on post-quantum (PQ) authentication has focused on the Web. Enterprise and mobile networks have different deployment constraints, and those constraints change what determines the pace of migration. In these networks, migration has a long, largely sequential critical path. Cryptographic modules must first support the new algorithms, products must integrate those modules, and the resulting implementations need to be validated or certified before deployment. Only then can new credentials be issued and rolled out across manufacturer and operator certificate hierarchies. The migration therefore cannot complete faster than the slowest of these steps.

This paper makes five observations:
1. Manufacturing and trust-anchor decisions create migration gates that protocols cannot remove.
2. Post-quantum readiness varies by device class.
3. The credential scheme affects long-term crypto-agility.
4. Large PQ credentials expose transport reliability problems, not merely latency problems.
5. The security benefit of PQ authentication arrives only when traditional authentication can be rejected