The growing reliance on digital communication has increased the importance of protecting transmitted information from tampering, forgery, and other security threats. At the same time, advances in quantum computing have raised concerns regarding the long-term security of traditional cryptographic mechanisms used for authentication and integrity verification. To address these challenges, this paper proposes a quantum-resilient data integrity verification framework that combines AES-GCM, SHA-256, Elliptic Curve Verifiable Random Functions (ECVRF), and the post-quantum signature scheme ML-DSA. In the proposed framework, encrypted data are associated with a cryptographic digest, a publicly verifiable proof, and a post-quantum digital signature before transmission. A prototype implementation was developed and evaluated through security, computational, and communication-overhead analyses. Experimental results showed that the framework successfully detected ciphertext modification, signature forgery, and replay attacks while maintaining the integrity and authenticity of transmitted data. The evaluation also indicated that ECVRF contributes the largest share of computational cost, whereas ML-DSA is responsible for most of the communication overhead due to its signature size. The findings demonstrate that the proposed framework can provide a practical combination of integrity verification, authenticity assurance, and quantum-resistant security for data transmission over untrusted networks.
Verma et al. (Mon,) studied this question.