QRoNS: Quantum Resilience over IPsec Tunnels for Network Slicing

Modern high-performance network infrastructures must address the challenges of scalability and quantum-resistant security, particularly in multi-tenant and virtualized environments. In this work, we introduce a novel implementation of Post-Quantum Cryptography (PQC)-IPsec using the NVIDIA BlueField-3 Data Processing Unit (Santa Clara, CA, USA), capable of achieving 400 Gbit/s. We demonstrate line-rate performance through quantum-resilient communication channels using Kyber1024 (ML-KEM) and Dilithium5 (ML-DSA). We evaluate our implementation on two experimental setups; a host-to-host configuration and a 16 Virtual Machines (VMs)-to-host setup, both across a direct high-speed link. We set the Data Processing Unit (DPU) on both Network Interface Card (NIC) mode with no/crypto/full packet offload and on DPU mode by configuring Open vSwitch (OvS) on the ARM cores and offloading the packet processing to the hardware. We achieve 97.5% of the available line-rate for 14 VMs and 99.9% for 16 VMs, in DPU mode. Our findings confirm that PQC-enabled IPsec can operate at line-rate speeds in modern data centers, providing a practical and future-proof foundation for secure, high-throughput communication in the post-quantum computing era.