Connectivity has become essential to modern manufacturing, but it also introduces new security challenges. Industrial IoT ecosystems rely on public-key cryptography to protect communications, firmware, and operational data. However, the emergence of quantum computing threatens to undermine these cryptographic foundations, exposing long-lived manufacturing systems to future attacks. This paper presents the Quantum-Secure IoT-based Digital Manufacturing Pilot, developed within the EU-funded QUBIP project, which investigates the integration of post-quantum cryptography (PQC) into IoT environments. The pilot aims to demonstrate how quantum resistant algorithms can be efficiently deployed across heterogeneous devices with limited resources to ensure data exchange and authentication. By combining software and hardware-based approaches, the proposed pilot provides a replicable model for PQC migration in digital manufacturing, ensuring long-term data integrity and resilience in the quantum era.

This paper deals with the design, implementation and validation of a new secure channel protocol to connect microcontrollers and secure elements. The new secure channel protocol (NSCP) relies on a lightweight cryptographic primitive (Xoodyak) and simplified operating principles to provide secure data exchange. The performance of the new protocol is compared with that of GlobalPlatform's Secure Channel Protocol 03 (SCP03), the current de facto standard for hardening the connection between a microcontroller and a secure element in industrial IoT. The evaluation was performed in two scenarios where the secure element was emulated with an ARM Cortex M4 and an OpenHW RISC-V MPU synthesized on an Artix FPGA. The results of the evaluation are an indicator of the potential advantage of the new protocol over SCP03: In the best case, the new protocol is able to apply cryptographic protection to messages from 3.64x to 4x with respect to SCP03 at its maximum security level. The speedup in the channel initiation process is also considerable, with a factor of up to 3.7. These findings demonstrate that it is possible to conceive a new protocol which offers adequate cryptographic protection, while being more lightweight than the present standard.

At FDTC 2014, two new infective countermeasures were suggested to efficiently protect the CRT-RSA against FA. The security of these countermeasures has been translated from the security of their detective counterparts, the latter being proved secure thanks to a formal analysis tool. In this article, we reveal a flaw in the proof of security of the translation. Furthermore, we exhibit several attacks on both infective countermeasures with respect to the very same fault model originally considered. We thus prove that such a methodology does not provide secure results and must not be used to design effective countermeasures.

Fault attacks are a common threat for embedded secure implementations. Among the various kinds of countermeasures proposed so far, the principle of infective computation seems to be one of the most efficient ways to counteract this threat. However, each and every original infective countermeasure suggested for asymmetric cryptosystems has been broken. Nowadays only two propositions for symmetric ciphers are still believed to be secure. Our paper presents the first attacks on both infective symmetric implementations, thus proving that these propositions rely on incomplete security analyses. By breaking the two last surviving infective methods, this paper shows once again that it is very difficult to design a secure infective countermeasure.