PQSec-DDS: Integrating Post-Quantum Cryptography into DDS Security for Robotic Applications

Leading cybersecurity agencies and standardization bodies have globally emphasized the critical need to transition towards Post-Quantum Cryptography (PQC) to defend against emerging quantum computing threats. They advocate PQC as a practical and cost-effective solution for security systems nowadays. Nevertheless, emerging technologies such as industrial systems, e.g., autonomous vehicles, air traffic management, diagnostic imaging machines, etc., and robotics systems, e.g., ROS2 (Robotic Operating System), have not started their evolution to enhance crypto-agility and security robustness. Some of these emerging technologies use the Data Distribution Service (DDS) standard as the underlying communication middleware protocol. DDS is a distributed publish-subscribe system that allows sending and receiving data by publishing and subscribing to topics across a network of connected nodes. However, DDS’s security is based on traditional symmetric and asymmetric cryptography, which is vulnerable to quantum computing attacks. To address this issue, we propose the integration of PQC into DDS, through the development of a C/C++ library, called pqsec-dds, which can be integrated across different DDS implementations such as CycloneDDS or OpenDDS. A proof-of-concept demonstrates the viability of our approach in enhancing the security and cryptoagility of DDS-based systems