Post-Quantum Security in 6G Core: Transitioning 5G-AKA to 6G-PQC

Replacing elliptic curve Diffie-Hellman in cellular authentication (AKA) protocols with lattice-based ML-KEM while preventing packet fragmentation.

Lattice Key Exchange in Primary Authentication Vectors

The legacy 5G Authentication and Key Agreement (5G-AKA) relies on curve25519 or SECP256R1, vulnerable to Shor's algorithm. 6G-PQC replaces ephemeral keys with ML-KEM-768 encapsulation, preserving backward compatibility within radio resource control (RRC) setup payloads.

MTU Fragmentation Mitigation for Post-Quantum Certificates

ML-DSA-65 signatures expand public keys and signature blobs to 3,293 bytes, exceeding typical cellular air-interface MTUs (1,500 bytes). The 6G hypervisor protocol utilizes stateful hash-based hybrid chains (SLH-DSA) and compression dictionaries to fit initial handshake credentials into single radio frames.

Key Engineering Invariants

NIST FIPS 203 ML-KEM replacing classical elliptic-curve Diffie Hellman
Sub-5 millisecond 6G-AKA end-to-end user authentication latency
Zero-fragmentation radio protocol adapters for ML-DSA-65 signatures
Hardware-accelerated cryptographic co-processors on baseband SoCs

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