Empowering Mobile Networks Security Resilience by using Post-Quantum Cryptography

Computer Science > Cryptography and Security [Submitted on 30 Mar 2026] Empowering Mobile Networks Security Resilience by using Post-Quantum Cryptography Ricardo Alves Faval, Rodrigo Moreira, Flávio de Oliveira Silva The transition to a cloud-native 5G Service-Based Architecture (SBA) improves scalability but exposes control-plane signaling to emerging quantum threats, including Harvest-Now, Decrypt-Later (HNDL) attacks. While NIST has standardized post-quantum cryptography (PQC), practical, deployable integration in operational 5G cores remains underexplored. This work experimentally integrates NIST-standardized ML-KEM-768 and ML-DSA into an open-source 5G core (free5GC) using a sidecar proxy pattern that preserves unmodified network functions (NFs). Implemented on free5GC, we compare three deployments: (i) native HTTPS/TLS, (ii) TLS sidecar, and (iii) PQC-enabled sidecar. Measurements at the HTTP/2 request-response boundary over repeated independent runs show that PQC increases end-to-end Service-Based Interface (SBI) latency to approximately 54 ms, adding a deterministic 48-49 ms overhead relative to the classical baseline, while maintaining tightly bounded variance (IQR <= 0.2 ms, CV < 0.4%). We also quantify the impact of Certification Authority (CA) security levels, identifying certificate validation as a tunable contributor to overall delay. Overall, the results demonstrate that sidecar-based PQC insertion enables a non-disruptive and operationally predictable migration path for quantum-resilient 5G signaling. Comments: Paper Accept for Publication at European Conference on Networks and Communications (EuCNC) 2026 Subjects: Cryptography and Security (cs.CR) Cite as: arXiv:2603.28626 [cs.CR]   (or arXiv:2603.28626v1 [cs.CR] for this version)   https://doi.org/10.48550/arXiv.2603.28626 Focus to learn more Journal reference: European Conference on Networks and Communications (EuCNC) 2026 Submission history From: Rodrigo Moreira [view email] [v1] Mon, 30 Mar 2026 16:09:56 UTC (11,828 KB) Access Paper: HTML (experimental) view license Current browse context: cs.CR < prev   |   next > new | recent | 2026-03 Change to browse by: cs 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?)