Energy-Efficient & Privacy-Preserving Adaptive Post-Quantum Secure Boot for Low-Power RISC-V IoT: A Hardware-Agnostic Approach with Empirical Validation

The advent of cryptographically relevant quantum computers threatens the classical public-key primitives (RSA, ECC) that currently secure the boot and over-the-air (OTA) update chains of billions of low-power Internet of Things (IoT) devices.