IJCATR Volume 13 Issue 12

Quantum-Resilient Infrastructure: Migrating US Financial Payment System to Post-Quantum Cryptography (PQC) Standards to Prevent 'Harvest Now, Decrypt Later' Attacks

Ogochukwu Friday Ikwuogu, Joy Selasi Agbesi, Fejiro Eni, Damilola Hannah Titilayo, Justin Njimgou Zeyeum
10.7753/IJCATR1312.1016
keywords : Post-Quantum Cryptography (PQC), Harvest Now Decrypt Later (HNDL), Lattice-Based Cryptography, ISO 20022, Hybrid Key Exchange, Cryptographic Agility, Shor’s Algorithm, FedWire and CHIPS, Mosca’s Theorem

PDF
The imminent advent of a Cryptographically Relevant Quantum Computer (CRQC) poses an existential threat to the US financial infrastructure. Current payment rails including FedWire, CHIPS, and ACH rely on RSA and ECC standards that are mathematically vulnerable to Shor’s Algorithm. This facilitates "Harvest Now, Decrypt Later" (HNDL) attacks, where encrypted data is intercepted today for future decryption. This paper evaluates the migration to NIST-standardized Post-Quantum Cryptography (PQC), specifically ML-KEM and ML-DSA. We analyze the architectural challenges of integrati ng these primitives into ISO 20022 formats, focusing on the trade-offs between increased packet size and sub-millisecond latency requirements. By proposing a phased migration framework using Hybrid Cryptographic Wrappers, this research provides a roadmap for maintaining regulatory compliance under NSM-10 while preventing a systemic collapse of digital trust and the associated multi-trillion-dollar risk to the US GDP.
@artical{o13122024ijcatr13121016,
Title = "Quantum-Resilient Infrastructure: Migrating US Financial Payment System to Post-Quantum Cryptography (PQC) Standards to Prevent 'Harvest Now, Decrypt Later' Attacks",
Journal ="International Journal of Computer Applications Technology and Research (IJCATR)",
Volume = "13",
Issue ="12",
Pages ="198 - 213",
Year = "2024",
Authors ="Ogochukwu Friday Ikwuogu, Joy Selasi Agbesi, Fejiro Eni, Damilola Hannah Titilayo, Justin Njimgou Zeyeum"}