Abstract The Internet can be thought of as a channel of information being sent from you to everyone else connected to the Internet. If you wanted to transmit your sensitive information (such as bank account numbers or military secrets) over the Internet, then you have to ensure that only the persons you intend to read your information have access to your sensitive data. Otherwise, everyone would be able to read your information, e.g., access to your bank account details and transfer money out of your account. Therefore, one needs to encrypt any data sent over the Internet. Encryption, in this context, ensures that only the intended sender and receiver can understand any message being sent over an Internet channel.
Abstract The Internet can be thought of as a channel of information being sent from you to everyone else connected to the Internet. If you wanted to transmit your sensitive information (such as bank account numbers or military secrets) over the Internet, then you have to ensure that only the persons you intend to read your information have access to your sensitive data. Otherwise, everyone would be able to read your information, e.g., access to your bank account details and transfer money out of your account. Therefore, one needs to encrypt any data sent over the Internet. Encryption, in this context, ensures that only the intended sender and receiver can understand any message being sent over an Internet channel.
Communication over the Internet is an integral part of the connected world. As the Internet is a public network, the data packets exchanged by the communicating parties pass through various insecure channels and untrusted servers before they reach their destinations. Still, we feel it is safe to send e-mails, visit social media websites, watch movies of our own preferences online, and shop online using credit cards. Cryptography or encryption makes it possible to protect our private information in the presence of third parties. When we browse a secured website, we see a lock symbol on the browser; it means our communication with the website is encrypted, and hence, no third party will be able to read the data packets exchanged between the browser and the website. Hypertext Transfer Protocol Secure (HTTPS) is used to establish an encrypted, hence secured communication channel between a web browser and a website. The browser website is just one example; cryptography is happening in your mobile phones, smart cards, IoT devices, and in almost all connected devices.
Building a quantum internet is a key ambition for many countries around the world; such a breakthrough will give them competitive advantage in a promising disruptive technology and opens a new world of innovations and unlimited possibilities. Quantum security leads us to the concept of quantum cryptography which uses physics to develop a cryptosystem completely secure against being compromised without the knowledge of the sender or the receiver of the messages. A quantum internet would be able to transmit large volumes of data across immense distances at a rate that exceeds the speed of light . Quantum cryptography uses photons to transmit a key. Once the key is transmitted, coding and encoding using the normal secret-key method can take place.
Quantum mechanics is valuable because it opens a discussion about the nature of reality, because it demonstrates the power of reason in revealing the truth even when common sense is an obstacle, and simply because it is good to know how our universe ticks (“knowledge is better than ignorance”). But it is also valuable because a host of practical devices, from lasers to transistors to superconductors, all work because of quantum mechanics. Most of these applications are beyond the scope of this book. I could tell you in vague terms how a laser works, but I could never convince you that my description was correct — you would have to accept it on my authority, and acceptance on the basis of authority is the very antithesis of scientific thought. However, there is one very recent, very exciting application of quantum mechanics that can be treated in full within the “rigorous but not technical” style of this book, namely the use of quantum mechanics to send coded messages. (You may skip this chapter without interrupting the flow of the book's argument.) Can you keep a secret? Sending coded messages is a part of life. Governments and businesses need to transmit secrets that would be deadly in the wrong hands (military plans, formulas for explosives, etc.). But even you have information that you don't want everyone in the world to know: your bank balance, your voting record, your vacation plans. I'm not suggesting that you should be embarrassed about your bank balance, but it's your private information and no eavesdropper has any right to it.
The practical implementation of quantum information technologies requires, for the most part, highly advanced and currently experimental procedures. One exception is quantum cryptography, or quantum key distribution, which has been successfully demonstrated in many laboratories and has reached an advanced level of development. It will probably become the first commercial application of quantum information. In quantum key distribution, Alice and Bob exploit a quantum channel to create a secret shared key comprising a random string of binary digits. This key can then be used to protect a subsequent communication between them. The principal idea is that the secrecy of the key distribution is ensured by the laws of quantum physics. Proving security for practical communication systems is a challenging problem and requires techniques that are beyond the scope of this book. At a fundamental level, however, the ideas are simple and may readily be understood with the knowledge we have already acquired. Quantum cryptography is the latest idea in the long history of secure (and not so secure) communications and, if it is to develop, it will have to compete with existing technologies. For this reason we begin with a brief survey of the history and current state of the art in secure communications before turning to the possibilities offered by quantum communications. The history of cryptography is a long and fascinating one. As a consequence of the success or, more spectacularly, the failure of ciphers, wars have been fought, battles decided, kingdoms won, and heads lost. In the information age, ciphers and cryptosystems have become part of everyday life; we use them to protect our computers, to shop over the Internet, and to access our money via an ATM (automated teller machine). One of the oldest and simplest of all ciphers is the transposition or Caesarean cipher (attributed to Julius Caesar), in which the letters are shifted by a known (and secret) number of places in the alphabet. If the shift is 1, for example, then A is enciphered as B, B→C, · · ·, Y→Z, Z→A. A shift of five places leads us to make the replacements A→F, B→G, · · ·, Y→D, Z→E.
Quantum mechanics is playing an important role in the security of encrypted messages through quantum cryptography. Cryptography is an important part of the computer and communication networks that protects data in many fields such as business e-mails, bank transactions, and Internet shopping. The information is kept secret using a mathematical formula called as encryption algorithm, with a secret key that the sender uses to scrabble a message in such form that is not understood by anyone other, the recipient then uses the same key in the form of along binary number with a detection algorithm to read the message. The secure bit rate decreases with the rate of the optical link due to scattering of the photons from the fiber, and the best performance is achieved by with a wavelength of 1.55μm at which the standard optical fiber is transparent. Companies are using the high width optical connections between the offices, data centers, server farms, and disaster recovery sites for safety.
Statement of the ProblemThe world has become one globalized platform with the advent of sophisticated embedded systems as it allows people to communicate in the local town to the farthest town on this earth.This includes communicating via mobile phones, Internet or sending an instruction to microwave oven, television and other wireless systems.We make assumptions that our communication remains confidential when we communicate using mobile phones or Internet.We assume that the payment gateway will be authenticated and our banking details will remain confidential, while accessing Internet banking.We assume that our instruction sent to the wireless embedded systems will be received exactly as we had sent (Integrity) i.e. the message sent by us and the message received by the embedded system will be the same.We make these assumptions as there will be certain protocols followed to maintain security standards.The security of these protocols is generally based on certain computationally 'hard' problems such as factoring a very large number.These are computationally hard problems to solve due to limited computational resources.If a quantum computer will be built, then these problems will no longer remain computationally hard.They will be solved in polynomial time complexity.Hence, our messages will remain neither confidential nor have integrity.Network communication will, no longer be able to authenticate.Similarly, electronic travel documents will not remain secured.Today, travel documents are an integral part of the daily routine.Among these travel documents, passports allow the holder's identity to be verified.This protects the nations against illegitimate immigrants, criminals and terrorists.Similar to the above mentioned scenario, advent of quantum computers will allow forfeiting of passports.It will also allow access to personal information.Hence, posing risk to millions of lives. Methods and ProceduresTo conquer these issues, we propose to conduct research on replacing the current travel document protocols by using Lattice-based cryptography.This could be replicated in all other network based embedded systems.We are motivated to use Latticebased cryptography as it is one of the important classes of the post-quantum cryptography algorithms.Lattice based algorithms are important due to significant research by scientific community, well-known underlying lattice problems and computational efficiency.