QuantumVault™ – Post-Quantum Cryptographic Protection System

**1. General Overview**

QuantumVault™ is a proprietary, production-ready post-quantum cryptography system integrated into MAPonME by BlackVoice Technologies™. It is built on the audited, minimal, and NIST-conformant JavaScript library **@noble/post-quantum**.

It fully implements the official NIST standards:

- **FIPS 203**: ML-KEM (formerly CRYSTALS-Kyber) for key encapsulation.

- **FIPS 204**: ML-DSA (formerly CRYSTALS-Dilithium) for digital signatures.

**Security Level**: NIST Category 3 (equivalent to ~AES-192 symmetric security), delivering strong long-term protection.

**Core Protection**: It fully defends against "harvest-now-decrypt-later" attacks — where adversaries collect encrypted traffic today and attempt to decrypt it later using scalable quantum computers (exploiting Shor's algorithm to break classical asymmetric schemes like RSA and ECC).

**User Impact**: Zero noticeable effect — the system activates/deactivates seamlessly, without slowing the app, increasing battery consumption, or altering the user experience.

**2. Cryptographic Algorithms**

- **ML-KEM-768 (Kyber-768)**

Lattice-based Key Encapsulation Mechanism (KEM), relying on the hardness of the Module Learning With Errors (MLWE) problem.

**Key sizes**: public key 1184 bytes, ciphertext 1088 bytes, shared secret 32 bytes.

**Performance** (benchmarks from optimized implementations on modern hardware, including mobile-relevant ARM/x86 tests):

- Key generation: ~20–75 µs (often ~22–32 µs on recent mobile-grade ARM like M1/M2 or high-end Cortex).

- Encapsulation: ~12–61 µs (optimized ~25–36 µs).

- Decapsulation: ~30–70 µs (optimized ~30–44 µs).

Extremely efficient for mobile devices, with low latency even on constrained ARM platforms (e.g., Cortex-M4 equivalents scale to sub-millisecond ranges in optimized libs).

- **ML-DSA-65 (Dilithium-3)**

Lattice-based digital signature scheme, also based on MLWE hardness.

Provides authentication and message integrity.

**Sizes**: public key ~1952 bytes, signature ~3309 bytes (moderate overhead).

**Performance** (benchmarks from reference/optimized implementations, including embedded/mobile-relevant ARM Cortex-M4 and high-end ARM):

- Key generation: ~0.15–1 ms (often ~0.2–0.5 ms on modern mobile ARM).

- Signing: ~0.35–0.84 ms (optimized ~0.45–0.7 ms).

- Verification: ~0.08–0.36 ms (often ~0.1–0.2 ms — very fast, comparable or better than ECDSA-P256 in verification).

Verification remains particularly efficient, making it suitable for frequent checks in messaging/SOS scenarios.

**3. How It Works in the Background (High-Level Flow)**

In the background, the system handles key management, encryption, and signing transparently:

- **Key exchange and encapsulation** — Generates public/private key pairs and securely encapsulates a shared secret using the recipient's public key (via ML-KEM-768). The recipient recovers the exact same shared secret using their private key. Keys are tied to short temporal epochs (5-minute duration by default) and automatically rotated when a new epoch begins, enhancing forward secrecy without user intervention.

- **Hybrid encryption** — Combines the post-quantum shared secret with classical symmetric encryption for maximum security:

- Derives an AES-256 key from the shared secret using HKDF-SHA256.

- Generates a 12-byte IV and encrypts the actual payload (messages, voice, SOS data, etc.) with AES-256-GCM.

- Optionally signs the resulting ciphertext with ML-DSA-65 for integrity and authentication.

- **Decryption and verification** — On receipt: verifies any signature (if present) with ML-DSA-65, decapsulates the shared secret (ML-KEM-768), derives the same AES-256 key, and decrypts the payload with AES-256-GCM.

All operations run end-to-end (server sees zero plaintext), with full statistics tracked internally (keys generated, encapsulations, signatures created/verified, rotation counts, time to next epoch). The entire process is optimized for mobile performance — fast enough to handle real-time messaging, voice notes, and urgent SOS alerts without perceptible delays.

QuantumVault™ makes MAPonME one of the earliest apps with native, full NIST post-quantum readiness — protecting all traffic against future quantum threats while keeping excellent real-world efficiency on phones and tablets.