Role of hash-based signatures in quantum cryptography.

The modern advancements in digital technologies and the growing concnern on multiple quantum attacks has shifted the confidence level from classical digital signature schemes to much more advanced cryptographic mechanisms. Considered to be the most significant cryptographic primitive so far, digital-signature schemes developed using hash functions always engrossed researchers as well as academia till now. Studies related to cryptography and related methodologies in the modern era have grown leaps and bounds owing to the constant and unavoidable dependency onIoT devices and its allied technologies. Objective of our proposal is to describe and examine the role of hash-signatures inquantum cryptography. As Internet-of-Things is gaining more focus due to its omnipresent nature where all the devices around us have been embedded with computational and communicational ability to gather, process, digest and understanddifferent types of data. Security of the data transmitted through the sensors in IOT eco system is a critical factor to define the success of the application and this is achieved through cryptographic algorithms like Elliptic-Curve-Cryptosystem. Alternatively, depending on security of legacy security techniques exposes applications and related data to hackers leading to data theft and malfunctioning of IOT apps. As a result, design of application security from legacy methodologies to quantum safe approach is essential for guaranteeing end-to-end security of data. In this paper, we investigate Signature scheme Based on Hash function (HBS) for securing devices in quantum era. Our research is based on Hash based Signature dataset. Since there is an uptick in Cloud based applications, volume of data required to be encrypted has also seen a bigger leap. While many end users have started using cloud computing environment for variousprocesses like storing and retrieval of sensitive data, it becomes essential to offer a safe and secure cyberspace. Our study has utilised Hybrid ECC and AES Algorithm for masking the data and to unmask it effectively. Masked data in files are stored on Cloud storage. Query based keyword search operation results in desired retrieval of required files securely. Our proposed model ensures data to be retrieved with optimal performance measured through different metrics like precision, recall, time required to complete search operation etc [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]