The machinery of industrial environments was connected to the Internet years ago with the scope of increasing their performance. However, this made such environments vulnerable against cyber-attacks that can compromise their correct functioning resulting in economic or social problems. Lately, an increase of cyberattacks to industrial environments has been experienced. Moreover, implementing cryptosystems in the communications between OT devices is a more challenging task than for IT environments since the OT are generally composed of legacy elements, characterized by low-computational capabilities. Consequently, implementing cryptosystems in industrial communication networks faces a trade-off between the security of the communications and the amortization of the industrial infrastructure. Critical Infrastructure (CI) refers to the industries which provide key resources for the daily social and economical development, e.g. electricity or water, and their communications are a very exposed target to cyberattacks. Furthermore, a new threat to cybersecurity has arisen with the theoretical proposal of quantum computers, due to their potential ability of breaking state-of-the-art cryptography protocols, such as RSA or ECC. The chase of functional quantum computers has resulted in a technological race involving many global agents. Those agents have become aware that transitioning their secure communications to a quantum secure paradigm is a priority that should be established before the arrival of fault-tolerance. In this sense, two main cryptographic solutions have been proposed: QKD and PQC. Nevertheless, quantum secure solutions have been mainly centered from the perspective of IT environments. In this paper, we provide a perspective of the problem of applying PQC solutions to CI and analyze which could be the most suitable cryptography schemes for these scenarios.

翻译：工业环境中的机械设备多年前已接入互联网，旨在提升其性能。然而，这使此类环境易受网络攻击影响，可能导致其正常功能受损，进而引发经济或社会问题。近期，针对工业环境的网络攻击有所增加。此外，在运营技术（OT）设备之间的通信中实施密码系统比信息技术（IT）环境更具挑战性，因为OT设备通常由传统元件构成，计算能力较低。因此，在工业通信网络中实施密码系统需在通信安全与工业基础设施的摊销之间进行权衡。关键基础设施（CI）指为社会和经济的日常发展提供关键资源（如电力或水）的行业，其通信是网络攻击的极易攻击目标。此外，随着量子计算机的理论提出，网络安全面临新威胁，因其可能具备破解现有密码协议（如RSA或ECC）的潜在能力。对功能性量子计算机的追求已引发一场涉及众多全球参与者的技术竞赛。这些参与者已意识到，在容错量子计算机出现之前，将其安全通信过渡到量子安全范式是应优先确立的任务。为此，已提出两种主要密码解决方案：QKD和PQC。然而，量子安全解决方案主要集中于IT环境视角。本文从将PQC解决方案应用于CI的角度审视问题，并分析哪些密码方案可能最适用于此类场景。