Post quantum federated authentication framework for Industrial Internet of Things using FALCON threshold signatures and zero knowledge verification

Abstract Distributed authentication techniques enable edge device trust in smart manufacturing and energy infrastructure Industrial Internet of Things contexts. Existing blockchain-based authentication schemes mostly use the elliptic curve digital signature algorithm, which can be exploited by quantum adversaries using harvest-now, decrypt-later attacks to record authenticated communications for cryptanalysis. CIPHER-QNL, a post-quantum federated authentication framework, integrates three complementary mechanisms: (1) FALCON threshold signature aggregation with federated polynomial key sharding over NTRU lattice rings for distributed multi-party authentication without centralized private-key exposure; and (2) zk-STARK-based privacy-preserving verification for blockchain consensus authentication proof validation without credential disclosure. Through threshold confidentiality, reduction-based reasoning, and computational complexity analysis, the proposed framework’s security is assessed under Module-SIS and NTRU lattice hardness assumptions. Controlled harvest now, decrypt adversarial authentication scenarios are used to evaluate TON-IoT communication performance. Scalable, privacy-preserving, post-quantum authentication for distributed Industrial Internet of Things environments is shown by 99.1% authentication integrity, 98.7% threshold signature aggregation latency reduction, and 0.29% false rejection rate.