E-QSafe Energy-Aware Quantum-Safe Encryption Scheme for Power-Controlled Internet of Nano Things

The Internet of Nano Things enables nanoscale devices to perform critical operations in healthcare, industry, and environmental monitoring. Nevertheless, ultra-small systems encounter tremendous challenges, including energy limitation, computation weakness, and exposure to quantum-era threats. No conventional cryptographic solution can maintain the effectiveness of both efficiency and post-quantum resilience under the above severe constraints. This paper designs E-QSafe, an Energy-Aware Quantum-Safe Encryption Scheme, to address the concern, which is featured by integrating an adaptive power control method with lattice-based Identity-Based Encryption. More specifically, the E-QSafe dynamically tunes the lattice dimensionality and Gaussian sampling variance based on the device’s residual presenting ratio to secure the communication with minimal energy dissipation. The mathematical optimization model is developed to adjust the energy consumption, delay, and strength during the encryption at various power levels. Extensive experiments and analysis validate E-QSafe’s security against quantum, replay, and side-channel attacks as well. The evaluation results show that the E-QSafe obtains a 35% reduction in total energy dissipation, reduces the communication cost by 30%, and enhances the throughput compared with conventional IoNT schemes. In short, E-QSafe effectively realizes quantum-resilient and energy-sustainable secure IoNT for nanonetwork computing in the next age.