Quantum key distribution with application to IOT security

Abstract

The Internet of Things (IoT) connects billions of machines that can interact with each other. IoT is one of the fastest-growing areas in the history of computing, and will continue in this direction in the 6G era. New security problems have been raised, however, for implementing protection mechanisms for IoT devices such as encryption, authentication, and so on, is inefficient, due to their inherent flaws. In fact, Classical cryptographic technology in use today is based on the hardness of certain numerical methods, such as integer factoring or the problem of discrete logarithms. However, because these problems are usually not known to be challenging to a malicious entity with quantum computing capability, the resulting cryptosystems are theoretically insecure. Therefore, a new method of protecting IoT devices needs to be sought. Quantum security depends on the natural physical phenomenon (quantum mechanics) and offers an appropriate and powerful security technique. This thesis suggests a new approach for simulating the quantum key distribution between IoT devices and a server to encrypt the data sent to the server. It also demonstrates the simplicity of this new method, and its efficiency in producing a quantum key distribution (QKD) simulation. In addition, it describes the use of the final length key for symmetrical security for IoT devices. Moreover, the simulation of the attacker between the server and IoT devices is performed, and two machine learning techniques were applied for detecting an attacker relying on the final quantum key length, even though the effect of that attacker on the quantum key length was within the acceptable threshold range