Quantum Encryption Resilience Score (QERS) for MQTT, HTTP, and HTTPS under Post-Quantum Cryptography in Computer, IoT, and IIoT Systems

TL;DR

This paper evaluates the Quantum Encryption Resilience Score (QERS) for MQTT, HTTP, and HTTPS protocols under post-quantum cryptography, highlighting efficiency and security trade-offs in resource-constrained IoT and IIoT systems.

Contribution

It introduces QERS as a comprehensive metric for comparing protocol efficiency and security resilience under PQC in IoT environments.

Findings

MQTT offers the best efficiency under PQC constraints.

HTTPS provides the highest security-weighted resilience but with higher resource costs.

QERS enables systematic comparison and informed protocol selection for PQC deployment.

Abstract

Post-quantum cryptography (PQC) introduces significant computational and communication overhead, which poses challenges for resource-constrained computer systems, Internet of Things (IoT), and Industrial IoT (IIoT) devices. This paper presents an experimental evaluation of the Quantum Encryption Resilience Score (QERS) applied to MQTT, HTTP, and HTTPS communication protocols operating under PQC. Using an ESP32-C6 client and an ARM-based Raspberry Pi CM4 server, latency, CPU utilization, RSSI, energy consumption, key size, and TLS handshake overhead are measured under realistic operating conditions. QERS integrates these heterogeneous metrics into normalized Basic, Tuned, and Fusion scores, enabling systematic comparison of protocol efficiency and security resilience. Experimental results show that MQTT provides the highest efficiency under PQC constraints, while HTTPS achieves the highest security-weighted resilience at the cost of increased latency and resource consumption. The proposed framework supports informed protocol selection and migration planning for PQC-enabled IoT and IIoT deployments.