On the Use of Quantum Communications for Securing IoT Devices in the 6G Era

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, since implementing protection mechanisms for IoT devices, such as encryption, authentication, and so on, is inefficient, due to their inherent flaws. 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 paper 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.