Aquaman: A Transparent Proxy Architecture for Quantum Resilient Key Establishment

Computer Science > Cryptography and Security [Submitted on 7 May 2026] Aquaman: A Transparent Proxy Architecture for Quantum Resilient Key Establishment Tushin Mallick, Ashish Kundu, Ramana Kompella The harvest-now, decrypt-later (HNDL) threat--adversaries intercepting and archiving ciphertext today for retrospective decryption once quantum computers mature--turns the future quantum threat into a present liability for the public-key primitives (RSA, Diffie-Hellman, ECC) that anchor modern session-key exchange. We present Aquaman, a transparent-proxy architecture for quantum-resilient session-key establishment. A transparent proxy intercepts session-key requests at the edge of a trusted network without requiring client-side configuration, deploying quantum-resistant capability at the network boundary on behalf of clients that may themselves lack post-quantum cryptography (PQC). Aquaman supports four operating modes: PQC offloaded to the proxy for clients without trusted PQC stacks; classical multi-path key fragmentation over heterogeneous media (with an optional anonymous proxy-pool variant); QKD with the SKIP/ETSI GS QKD 014 key-delivery interface; and classical/PQC hybrid handshakes. We implement and evaluate the first two modes; the latter two are well-trodden in the PQC literature and we discuss but do not implement them. The implemented multi-path mode splits the session key into ciphertext fragments distributed across diverse media (Wi-Fi, Bluetooth, NFC, cellular, Ethernet); reconstruction requires all fragments. We formalize the security argument and prove that recovery probability decays as (B/d)^n in the diversity dimension. A 1,000-run prototype evaluation on AWS EC2 shows that latency is dominated by network transmission, not by multi-path overhead. Subjects: Cryptography and Security (cs.CR); Networking and Internet Architecture (cs.NI) Cite as: arXiv:2605.06932 [cs.CR]   (or arXiv:2605.06932v1 [cs.CR] for this version)   https://doi.org/10.48550/arXiv.2605.06932 Focus to learn more Submission history From: Tushin Mallick [view email] [v1] Thu, 7 May 2026 20:45:39 UTC (99 KB) Access Paper: HTML (experimental) view license Current browse context: cs.CR < prev   |   next > new | recent | 2026-05 Change to browse by: cs cs.NI References & Citations NASA ADS Google Scholar Semantic Scholar Export BibTeX Citation Bookmark Bibliographic Tools Bibliographic and Citation Tools Bibliographic Explorer Toggle Bibliographic Explorer (What is the Explorer?) Connected Papers Toggle Connected Papers (What is Connected Papers?) Litmaps Toggle Litmaps (What is Litmaps?) scite.ai Toggle scite Smart Citations (What are Smart Citations?) Code, Data, Media Demos Related Papers About arXivLabs Which authors of this paper are endorsers? | Disable MathJax (What is MathJax?)