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Talk · International Conference on Digital Media, Communication and Information Systems · August 1, 2026

Network-Level DoS Risks of SLH-DSA Signatures: Fragmentation, Packet Loss and Receiver-Side Resource Utilization

Zarina Kabduali, Dinargul Mukhammejanova, Anel Aidos, Adil Mukhamedgali, Assel Mukasheva

Assel Mukasheva
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Abstract

Shor’s algorithm demonstrates that widely used public-key cryptographic schemes, such as RSA and ECC are vulnerable to quantum attacks. In addition, they must be investigated not only regarding their mathematical resilience, but also with respect to the physical factors of their integration environment. This work evaluates, the strength of SLH-DSA signature during network transmission. Experiment A used all twelve FIPS 205 parameter sets with MTU values of 1500, 1280 and 576 bytes and independent packet loss rates from 0% to 5%. Experiment B generated benign offered loads of 100 – 5000 packets per second and transmitted 100,000 packets per scenario while monitoring receiver-side CPU, resident memory and thread count. Signatures were generated before the network measurements. Therefore, signing cost was excluded and the receiver didn’t perform cryptographic verification. The result shows that large SLH-DSA signature variants produce substantially more fragments, lose reassembly reliability under random loss, and increase receiver CPU demand under sustained traffic. These findings identify a potential denial-of-service (DoS) exposure under the stated test conditions. They don’t constitute a demonstration of an active fragmentation attack or universal throughput limit.

Network Security and Intrusion DetectionAdvanced Authentication Protocols SecuritySmart Grid Security and ResilienceSLH-DSAdigital signaturesdenial-of-service attacks

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