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.

Side-channel resilience is a critical requirement for cryptographic accelerators. However, current validation approaches rely heavily on costly, measurement-based testing, which is typically applicable only at the final stages of the design flow. This reliance on physical prototypes is aggravated by the lack of integrated security analysis in fragmented toolchains. To address these challenges, we introduce the HWSEC-OSS Framework, a comprehensive open-source platform designed to streamline the security validation of hardware designs. The framework integrates a complete digital design flow with a pre-silicon Side-Channel Analysis (SCA) module based on Hamming-distance power modeling. We demonstrate the effectiveness of the framework by identifying leakage sources in an EdDSA25519 implementation, exhibiting a strong correlation between simulation-based results and measurements from a physical FPGA prototype. Furthermore, we apply the flow to a hardware implementation of ML-KEM, demonstrating scalability to Post-Quantum Cryptography (PQC). By providing an integrated environment for early security feedback, this work constitutes a fast, cost-effective solution for hardware security validation.

The adoption of Post-Quantum Cryptography over the security network layer, such as Transport Layer Security, poses significant challenges, particularly in the context of Internet of Things (IoT) devices, where power and area constraints frequently limit the adoption of hardened security features. In addressing this challenge, hardware-based Secure Elements become a crucial component in facilitating cryptographic operations and storing secret keys within these frameworks. However, the design and validation of such hardware modules require substantial time investment. Consequently, this can result in the allocation of time that could be utilized for the development of other essential components of the Post-Quantum Transition. In this context, the present work proposes a methodology for the integration of Secure Elements on IoT devices, with the objective of reducing the time required for design and validation. To this end, two distinct categories of IoT devices (microcontrollers and embedded processors) have been employed to encompass the broadest possible range of IoT devices. The outcome of this study is the delivery of an open-source cryptographic library that can be deployed in any type of IoT devices. This library facilitates the implementation of Post-Quantum Cryptography in Secure Elements enabling crypto-agility and ensuring a smooth PostQuantum transition for IoT.