Abstract

The fast adoption of distributed e-learning platforms has brought about serious cybersecurity concerns in terms of securing communication, authentications, and ensuring data confidentiality in cloud-based learning services. Traditional forms of cryptography, including RSA and ECC, are becoming increasingly susceptible to attacks due to quantum computation, thus requiring quantum-proofing of communication systems. In this research, a Hybrid Quantum-Resistant Communication Architecture (H-QRCF) is proposed to enable secure communication between distributed e-learning services using post-quantum cryptography, along with light symmetric encryption and secure authentication. The hybrid framework consists of post-quantum key exchanges, AES-256 symmetric encryptions, SHA-3 hash functions, and session authentication. The entire communication system was developed in Python 3.11 and tested in a distributed communication network environment composed of 25 distributed e-learning service nodes and 50,000 secure communication instances. Results were obtained on six important performance parameters, including encryption time, decryption time, throughput, packet delivery ratio, communication overhead, and security strength. The experimental results confirmed that the proposed H-QRCF architecture provided significantly improved results compared to other techniques such as RSA, ECC, AES-RSA Hybrid, and classical post-quantum approaches. With the proposed technique, the encryption time is reduced to 63 ms and the decryption time is reduced to 68 ms, delivering a throughput of 78 Mbps and a packet delivery ratio of 98.7%. Furthermore, the proposed approach ensures minimal communication overhead of 12% and 98% defense against various types of attacks, including replay attack, impersonation attack, brute force attack, and quantum attack. An ablation study has also validated the benefits of using post-quantum key exchange, hybrid encryption, authentication, and session key refresh methods in the proposed approach.