Sentinel-Based Failover for QKD-Augmented IPsec Tunnels

Abstract

Quantum-safe IPsec through hybrid key establishment is practical, but creates a critical operational challenge: how to maintain tunnel availability when the QKD infrastructure becomes unavailable. In this paper, we present the design, implementation, and experimental evaluation of a quantum-safe key establishment mechanism for an IPsec tunnel that combines X25519, ML-KEM, and ETSI GS QKD 014 keys through the RFC 9370 multiple key exchange mechanism, and that degrades gracefully when the QKD key delivery fails. Our open-source StrongSwan plugin uses a sentinel-based coordination protocol, thereby permitting us to complete the handshake even if the QKD leg fails, instead of aborting, restoring the QKD share at the next rekey. On a testbed connected to a metropolitan QKD link over 33 km of deployed fiber, we evaluated five configurations, from a classical X25519 with RSA baseline to a hybrid one that adds ML-KEM-1024 and a QKD key. The full hybrid authentication costs 103 ms against 61 ms for the baseline, the QKD retrieval itself adds only about 7 ms. Failure injection experiments confirm that the tunnel survives a complete KME outage without any interruption of the protected traffic.