Quantum-Resilient Banking Transaction Security using DW-HKEM: A Hybrid RSA/ML-KEM Cryptographic Gateway with Real-Time
2026-07-20 • Cryptography and Security
Cryptography and Security
AI summaryⓘ
The authors address the growing security risks in online banking caused by quantum computers that could break current encryption methods like RSA-2048. They developed a new system combining traditional RSA and a quantum-resistant method (ML-KEM) to protect encryption keys together, ensuring safety against both current and future quantum attacks. Their solution also includes a real-time dashboard for monitoring encryption performance and security. Tests show their system works quickly enough for practical use in banks, and they have shared the full source code for others to use.
RSA-2048Quantum ComputingKey Encapsulation MechanismHybrid CryptographyAES-256SHA-256Post-Quantum CryptographyCryptographic AnalyticsDual-Wrap Hybrid Key EncapsulationHarvest Now, Decrypt Later (HNDL)
Authors
Siddhaarth S Prabhu, Aswani Kumar Cherukuri
Abstract
The increasing number of online banking and financial services on public-facing networks has caused security of cryptographic protocols to become a serious, systemic problem. RSA-2048 is the key length that is used in the majority of transactions that travel over the Internet every day. A very insidious threat vector, the Harvest Now, Decrypt Later (HNDL) paradigm, is already in existence with the adversarial nation-state actors and well-funded threat actors. The exposure window is not a time in the future it is the NOW moment! Quantum computation is a certain threat to the current public-key cryptographic infrastructure, and one that is moving ever closer. In this paper, the authors take up both of these challenges, designing, implementing and testing an integrated system based on a Dual-Wrap Hybrid Key Encapsulation Mechanism (DW-HKEM) and a live cryptographic analytics dashboard. Both the RSA-256 and ML-KEM-768 are hosted within the DW-HKEM framework and an AES-256 session key is wrapped in each of them, with a composite key created using a Key Derivation Function based on SHA-256, resulting in combinatorial security against classical and quantum adversaries and backwards compatibility with existing banking systems. The CryptoX real-time dashboard offers time tracking for each operation, session-level analytics and visualization of performance trends for immediate use in enterprise banking security operations. The results from empirical benchmarking across 100 independent iterations show a total overhead of about 1.58ms, which is well within the enterprise deployment threshold, proving the architecture viable as a practical, scalable reference for the financial-sector's cryptographic infrastructure and applications to move to a post-quantum era. We also provide complete source code of the work carried out.