Graduation Year

2026

Document Type

Dissertation

Degree

Ph.D.

Degree Name

Doctor of Philosophy (Ph.D.)

Degree Granting Department

Computer Science and Engineering

Major Professor

Attila A. Yavuz, Ph.D.

Committee Member

Srinivas Katkoori, Ph.D.

Committee Member

Mehran Mozaffari Kermani, Ph.D.

Committee Member

Yao Liu, Ph.D.

Committee Member

Gokhan Mumcu, Ph.D.

Committee Member

Kaiqi Xiong, Ph.D.

Keywords

Authenticated Encryption, Authentication, Internet of Things, Post-Quantum Cryptography

Abstract

The security of our increasingly interconnected world is strongly dependent on the strength and practicality of the cryptographic tools we deploy. As billions of embedded devices join the Internet of Things (IoT) and interact with remote cloud infrastructures for data processing, analysis, and actuation, they evolve into so-called digital twins. This rapid expansion introduces numerous attack vectors, particularly targeting constrained IoT devices, which greatly increase the attack surface and often become the root cause of large-scale infrastructure compromises. At the same time, the rise of quantum computing threatens the hardness of today’s intractability assumptions that underpin cryptographic primitives currently deployed. Moreover, physical- and malware-based attacks are constantly targeting vulnerable embedded devices. Finally, it is significantly more challenging to provide security services for low-end IoT devices that have limited resources, including limited energy, storage, computing capabilities, and available bandwidth.

In this dissertation, we propose a new series of lightweight and resilient cryptographic protocols in both private- and public-key settings. In the private-key setting, we propose an efficient and breach-resilient authenticated encryption that enables minimal online execution and significantly reduces the energy usage on constrained platforms. In the public-key setting, we focus on authentication protocols using digital signatures with advanced properties. We propose a new series of conventional digital signatures for secure logging in the IoT and cold cloud continuum. In parallel, we propose a new series of conventional breach-resilient digital signatures, which harnesses Trusted Execution Environments (TEEs) to enable efficient signature generation with minimal energy consumption on constrained signers, while ensuring a breach-resilient signature verification by harnessing distributed cloud support. Finally, we propose a hybrid digital signature scheme that uniquely blends efficient aggregate digital signature and post-quantum and forward-secure digital signature, achieving compact cryptographic payload with quantum-safe and compromise-resilient umbrella authentication tag, towards resilient constrained IoT platforms in the post-quantum era.

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