HPQ-AKE: A Provably Secure Sign-Less Hybrid Authenticated Key Exchange Protocol for Bandwidth-Constrained IoT and Edge Networks
HPQ-AKE is a sign-less hybrid key exchange protocol designed to migrate from classical security to post-quantum cryptography efficiently. It replaces transcript signatures with dual Key Encapsulation Mechanisms (KEMs) for session secrecy and implicit mutual authentication, significantly reducing handshake communication overhead by 56.4% and improving latency in constrained networks.