In the wireless sensor networks (WSNs), sensor nodes may be deployed in the hostile areas. The eavesdropper can intercept the messages in the public channel and the communication between the nodes is easily monitored. Furthermore, any malicious intermediate node can act as a legal receiver to alter the passing messages. Hence, message protection and sensor node identification become important issues in WSN. In this paper, we propose a novel scheme providing unconditional secure communication based on the quantum characteristics, including no-cloning and teleportation. We present a random EPR-pair allocation scheme that is designed to overcome the vulnerability caused by possible compromised nodes. EPR pairs are pre-assigned to sensor nodes randomly and the entangled qubits are used by the nodes with the quantum teleportation scheme to form a secure link. We also show a scheme on how to resist the man-in-the-middle attack. In the framework, the qubits are allocated to each node before deployment and the adversary is unable to create the duplicated nodes. Even if the malicious nodes are added to the network to falsify the messages transmitting in the public channel, the legal nodes can easily detect the fake nodes that have no entangled qubits and verify the counterfeit messages. In addition, we prove that one node sharing EPR pairs with a certain amount of neighbor nodes can teleport information to any node in the sensor network if there are sufficient EPR pairs in the qubits pool. The proposal shows that the distributed quantum wireless sensor network gains better security than classical wireless sensor network and centralized quantum wireless network.
In the wireless sensor networks (WSNs), sensor nodes may be deployed in the hostile areas. The eavesdropper can intercept the messages in the public channel and the communication between the nodes is easily monitored. Furthermore, any malicious intermediate node can act as a legal receiver to alter the passing messages. Hence, message protection and sensor node identification become important issues in WSN. In this paper, we propose a novel scheme providing unconditional secure communication based on the quantum characteristics, including no-cloning and teleportation. We present a random EPR-pair allocation scheme that is designed to overcome the vulnerability caused by possible compromised nodes. EPR pairs are pre-assigned to sensor nodes randomly and the entangled qubits are used by the nodes with the quantum teleportation scheme to form a secure link. We also show a scheme on how to resist the man-in-the-middle attack. In the framework, the qubits are allocated to each node before deployment and the adversary is unable to create the duplicated nodes. Even if the malicious nodes are added to the network to falsify the messages transmitting in the public channel, the legal nodes can easily detect the fake nodes that have no entangled qubits and verify the counterfeit messages. In addition, we prove that one node sharing EPR pairs with a certain amount of neighbor nodes can teleport information to any node in the sensor network if there are sufficient EPR pairs in the qubits pool. The proposal shows that the distributed quantum wireless sensor network gains better security than classical wireless sensor network and centralized quantum wireless network.
Wireless Sensor Networks (WSNs) are self-organising networks designed for distributed data collection and communication. In this study, the application of quantum cryptography in WSNs is employed by employing quantum teleportation and quantum logic gates to securely transmit data from a source sensor node to a sink node. Specifically, the Toffoli and Peres gates were integrated with quantum teleportation to reduce network constraints and enhance security. The study propose a random Einstein–Podolsky–Rosen (EPR) pair allocation scheme to mitigate vulnerabilities arising from potentially compromised nodes. In this scheme, EPR-paradox pairs are preassigned as quantum bits to sensor nodes in a random manner. Quantum entanglement within these pairs, combined with quantum teleportation, establishes secure communication links across the wireless network. The results indicate that both Toffoli and Peres gates produce identical output expressions for data transmission between sensor nodes within the network. The proposed framework eliminates the need for traditional key exchange mechanisms, which are known to be vulnerable to interception and computational attacks
As sensor nodes are deployed anywhere in a wireless sensor network, hence their communication can be easily monitored. In these networks, message protection and node identification are very issues. Hence, security of large scale such networks requires efficient key distribution and management mechanisms. Quantum cryptography and particularly quantum key distribution is such a technique that allocates secure keys only for short distances. While not completely secure, it offers huge advantages over traditional methods by the use of entanglement swapping and quantum teleportation. Reversible logic gates like CNOT, Toffoli, Fredkin etc. are of basic importance in Quantum Computing. In our research, we adopted a EPR-pair allocation scheme in terms of these quantum gates to overcome the susceptibility caused by malicious nodes. As the qubits stored in a sensor node can be used only once and cannot be duplicated, hence risk of information leakage reduced even if the node are compromised.
In the wireless communication network, transmitting messages from sender to receiver may traverse several intermediate nodes. Any eavesdropper can attack in the communication channel, and any malicious intermediate node can act as receiver to intercept the message. The secure routing path must solve channel attacks and attacks in the malicious node. In the classical field, the solution of the channel attacks is conditional security and we can not provide secure communication in the routing path from sender to receiver. In the quantum field, the security of the authentication protocol is based on the laws of nature, including no-cloning theorem and quantum teleportation. According to the property of no-cloning theorem and quantum teleportation, we can use the shared quantum entangled particles between communicators for liar detection problem. In the quantum cryptography, the security of the authentication protocol is unconditional security. This paper designs the two-way secure communication protocol, which can set up the secure routing path from sender to receiver. The two-way secure communication protocol includes the sender oriented checking and the receiver oriented checking. By using quantum sharing table, these checking schemes investigate whether the routing path is secure or not. In the beginning, the sender and receiver pre-share a quantum sharing table to detect all the dishonest nodes. The quantum sharing table acts as a quantum key distribution which can not be stolen by any Eve.
Abstract Wireless sensor networks (WSNs) play a crucial role in various applications, ranging from environmental monitoring to industrial automation that require high levels of security. With the development of quantum technologies, many security mechanisms may be hacked due to the promising capabilities of quantum computation. To address this challenge, quantum protocols have emerged as a promising solution for enhancing the security of wireless sensor communications. One of the common types of quantum protocols is quantum key distribution (QKD) protocols, which are investigated to allow two participants with fully quantum capabilities to share a random secret key, while semi-quantum key distribution (SQKD) protocols are designed to perform the same task using fewer quantum resources to make quantum communications more realizable and practical. Quantum walk (QW) plays an essential role in quantum computing, which is a universal quantum computational paradigm. In this work, we utilize the advantages of QW to design three authenticated quantum cryptographic protocols to establish secure channels for data transmission between sensor nodes: the first one is authenticated quantum key distribution (AQKD), the second one is authenticated semi-quantum key distribution (ASQKD) with one of the two participants having limited quantum capabilities, and the last one is ASQKD but both legitimate users possess limited quantum resources. The advantages of the proposed protocols are that the partners can exchange several different keys with the same exchanged qubits, and the presented protocols depend on a one-way quantum communication channel. In contrast, all previously designed SQKD protocols rely on two-way quantum communication. Security analyses prove that the presented protocols are secure against various well-known attacks and highly efficient. The utilization of the presented protocols in wireless sensor communications opens up new avenues for secure and trustworthy data transmission, enabling the deployment of resilient WSNs in critical applications. This work also paves the way for future exploration of quantum-based security protocols and their integration into WSNs for enhanced data protection.
In the distributed network, quantum teleportation can teleport a quantum state from one quantum device to a remote site by using quantum entangled particles. Quantum entangled particles have the correlation among sharing party of distributed node to form a special relation for transmitting quantum message and classical message. In the paper, we derive a novel quantum key with indirect communication among sharing party. In the deriving process, random measurement outcome can resist eavesdropping from the outsider. An attacker is unable to break a secret quantum key in the deriving process. In addition, several types of attack in the transmission security can be considered in the distributed networks.
The problem of security in a sensor network has been researched mainly with methods derived from classical cryptography. With the advance of quantum computation and quantum cryptography, the problem of securing a sensor network with quantum means is immediate. The present paper adapts an existing quantum security protocol [1] to sensor networks. The contribution of the protocol is that it shares a secret message between two nodes of the sensor network, without showing in the environment any information about the content of the message. The information visible to other nodes and to the environment refers to array indices and to the reading strategy, but not to the values read. As each piece of secret information has a distinct public encoding, the protocol is equivalent to a one-time pad protocol. To exploit quantum properties, sensor nodes are endowed with coherent qubits, that can be read and set within the node. Additionally, there exists a central authority that manages the identity of the nodes and can perform quantum entanglement swapping.