Toward Quantum-Resilient and Privacy-Preserving Student Attendance Systems Using Hybrid Post-Quantum Cryptography

The rapid digital transformation of academic record and student attendance systems demands security mechanisms that simultaneously provide confidentiality, integrity, privacy-preserving data analytics, and long-term resilience against emerging quantum threats. While conventional cryptographic algorithms such as RSA, ECC, and AES remain computationally efficient, public-key schemes based on RSA and ECC are vulnerable to quantum attacks, limiting their suitability for protecting sensitive educational information in the long term. Existing studies generally focus either on post-quantum secure communication or on privacy-preserving computation, resulting in fragmented security architectures that increase implementation complexity in resource-constrained academic environments. To address this challenge, this paper proposes a Lightweight Hybrid Post-Quantum Cryptographic Algorithm (LHPQCA) that integrates the CRYSTALS-Kyber Key Encapsulation Mechanism (KEM) for quantum-resistant session key establishment, AES-GCM for authenticated encryption of attendance records, and the Paillier additive homomorphic cryptosystem for privacy-preserving aggregation of attendance statistics over encrypted data. By assigning each cryptographic primitive according to its intended function, the proposed architecture achieves quantum-secure key establishment, efficient symmetric data protection, and secure encrypted computation without relying on post-quantum algorithms for bulk data encryption. Experimental evaluation demonstrates that incorporating the Paillier cryptosystem introduces only modest computational overhead while preserving practical encryption latency, reducing key establishment latency by 28–35%, decreasing CPU utilization by 22%, and maintaining bandwidth overhead below 12% compared with conventional hybrid deployment architectures that perform secure communication without privacy-preserving aggregation. These results demonstrate that the proposed integration of CRYSTALS-Kyber, AES-GCM, and the Paillier cryptosystem provides an effective balance between quantum resilience, computational efficiency, and privacy-preserving analytics, making LHPQCA suitable for next-generation academic attendance systems and other resource-constrained educational applications. Keywords - Post-Quantum Cryptography, Hybrid Cryptographic Algorithm, CRYSTALS-Kyber, Key Encapsulation Mechanism (KEM), AES-GCM, Paillier Cryptosystem, Privacy-Preserving Analytics.