A Post-Quantum Cryptographic Approach for Secure Fine-Grained Access Control in Next-Generation Systems

Abstract

The Internet of Things (IoT) and Industrial IoT (IIoT) technologies experience rapid growth, which leads to better data-driven operations in modern systems that especially benefit sustainable supply chain management environments. The systems experience growing threats because hackers develop advanced cyberattacks and quantum computing technology will soon break existing cryptographic methods. The paper presents a solution to the identified problems which establishes a post-quantum security framework that combines Post-Quantum Cryptography (PQC) with Particle Swarm Optimization (PSO) feature selection and hyperparameter-tuned XGBoost classification and Attribute-Based Access Control (ABAC) security solutions. The model operates in IoT-enabled sustainable supply chain systems which need security, trust, resilience to protect their logistics and warehouse and inventory processes. PSO selects the best features to reduce computation requirements while XGBoost improves intrusion detection by categorizing supply chain data traffic into Normal and Malicious and Attack groups. ABAC provides precise access management, which enables secure decision-making based on contextual information for supply chain processes. The experimental results show that the proposed model achieved accuracy of 97.50%, precision of 99.01%, recall of 98.95%, F1-score of 98.98%, and an AUC of 0.997, which exceeds the performance of Random Forest and SVM. The encryption process now takes 120 ms to 40 ms while the decryption process maintains its previous duration