Securing Financial Transactions Using DLT-Enabled Quantum-Safe Authentication Scheme

Abstract

The rapid growth of digital financial services demands secure and privacy-preserving authentication schemes resilient to quantum attacks. The current approaches, which depend on public-key based bilinear pairings, RSA, and Elliptic Curve Cryptography (ECC), are susceptible to quantum algorithms. This paper proposes a novel Distributed Ledger Technology (DLT)-enabled post-quantum authentication scheme that integrates lattice-based cryptography with DLT to ensure quantum resistant, tamper-proof and privacy-preserving transactions. The protocol enables effective multi-phase authentication between users, servers, and DLT nodes by utilising the lattice-based Ring-Learning With Errors (LWE) hard problem for secure key establishment. Security and performance analyses demonstrate low computational overhead, and scalability for real-time financial ecosystems.