Machine-Checked Verification of HPQ-AKE

Develop a machine-checked formal verification of the HPQ-AKE protocol’s post-quantum security properties using automated verification frameworks such as EasyCrypt or CryptoVerif, thereby validating the manual game-based reduction.

Background

The paper presents a manual game-based security reduction for HPQ-AKE in a hybrid framework combining the Random Oracle Model for classical RSA-based authentication with the Quantum Random Oracle Model for ML-KEM-based secrecy. The authors explicitly identify automated verification as an unresolved direction because manual cryptographic proofs may contain subtle errors. They propose encoding the protocol execution and security arguments in EasyCrypt or CryptoVerif to obtain machine-checked guarantees of the claimed post-quantum security properties.

References

Further platform-specific validation is needed before deployment; the following research and engineering directions remain open: Computer-Verified Formal Verification: Although this paper establishes a rigorous, game-based formal reduction in the Quantum Random Oracle Model (QROM), manual cryptographic proofs remain susceptible to subtle human errors. Future work will focus on modeling the HPQ-AKE execution flow inside automated verification frameworks, such as EasyCrypt or CryptoVerif, to derive machine-checked mathematical guarantees of its post-quantum security properties.

— HPQ-AKE: A Provably Secure Sign-Less Hybrid Authenticated Key Exchange Protocol for Bandwidth-Constrained IoT and Edge Networks  (2610.12024 - Pham-Tuan et al., 8 Oct 2026) in Section 6, subsection “Future Work”