The swift, secure transmission of data, especially sensitive data, such as that acquired from high-resolution image sensors, is a major focus of the Industrial Internet of Things (IIoT). Current strategies do not strike a balance between security and efficiency, causing messages to be lost and/or processing to be delayed to an unacceptable level. We present a new quantum-inspired quantum walk (Q-IQW) encryption protocol. The Q-IQW protocol is used to implement the first blockchain for the safe transfer of data between IIoT devices. For the first time, quantum hash functions based on Q-IQW are used to link blocks in a chain instead of traditional hash functions. The main contributions of the protocol are the efficient data transfer between IIoT nodes and the ability to fully control their data. This work focuses on simulating the protocol to understand the theoretical and empirical performance of the protocol. The results show that in terms of entropy of 7.99 and unified average changing intensity (UACI) of 33.56%, the protocol is very robust as evidenced by 99.58% number of pixel change rate (NPCR), and low correlation, i.e., the protocol exhibits very high security. Further, the protocol is reliable in that it can perfectly recover images under high distortion, for example, a 50% data occlusion in the encrypted images. These outcomes underscore the dependability, utility, and efficiency of the protocol in protecting IIoT information to make it a viable remedy for maintaining the integrity of the information during transfer and storage.
The swift, secure transmission of data, especially sensitive data, such as that acquired from high-resolution image sensors, is a major focus of the Industrial Internet of Things (IIoT). Current strategies do not strike a balance between security and efficiency, causing messages to be lost and/or processing to be delayed to an unacceptable level. We present a new quantum-inspired quantum walk (Q-IQW) encryption protocol. The Q-IQW protocol is used to implement the first blockchain for the safe transfer of data between IIoT devices. For the first time, quantum hash functions based on Q-IQW are used to link blocks in a chain instead of traditional hash functions. The main contributions of the protocol are the efficient data transfer between IIoT nodes and the ability to fully control their data. This work focuses on simulating the protocol to understand the theoretical and empirical performance of the protocol. The results show that in terms of entropy of 7.99 and unified average changing intensity (UACI) of 33.56%, the protocol is very robust as evidenced by 99.58% number of pixel change rate (NPCR), and low correlation, i.e., the protocol exhibits very high security. Further, the protocol is reliable in that it can perfectly recover images under high distortion, for example, a 50% data occlusion in the encrypted images. These outcomes underscore the dependability, utility, and efficiency of the protocol in protecting IIoT information to make it a viable remedy for maintaining the integrity of the information during transfer and storage.
In the rapidly evolving landscape of technology, integrating blockchain with Industrial Internet of Things (IIoT) presents a groundbreaking synergy with transformative potential. This paper addresses key security challenges in IIoT environments by proposing a novel authentication mechanism for Industrial Internet of Things (IIoT) systems that enhances security by integrating Quantum-Elliptic Curve Cryptography (QECC) and a blockchain-regulated, automatic key refreshment mechanism. Building on the ECC-based Diffie-Hellman protocol, our approach addresses vulnerabilities such as Man-in-the-Middle (MITM) attacks by combining quantum cryptography with ECC to detect eavesdroppers and secure communications between Base Stations (BS), Relay Stations (RS), and Subscriber Stations (SS). The blockchain-regulated mechanism ensures periodic and verifiable key updates, enhancing key management against MAC layer and spoofing attacks. This integrated framework significantly improves the security of IIoT systems by ensuring confidentiality, integrity, availability, authenticity, and non-repudiation, offering a robust solution for secure data transmission in IIoT environments.
With the growing Internet of Things (IoT), many applications like traffic management, smart cities, environment monitoring, industrial automation and healthcare have been revolutionized. As the number of resourcelimited IoT devices grows and connects with each other, security issues have become more intricate and severe, such as unauthorized access, data tampering, replay attacks, and the rise in threat from quantum computing to traditional cryptographic methods. To solve those problems, this paper proposes Quantum Shield-IoT, which is a quantum-resilient hybrid security framework that combines the Quantum Key Distribution (QKD) protocol of BB84 with ASCON lightweight authenticated encryption, blockchain security, and cloud computing to ensure secure end-to-end data transmission in IoT. The BB84 protocol works both to generate quantum secure cryptographic keys, and to identify eavesdropping via Quantum Bit Error Rate (QBER) analysis. The generated keys are used by ASCON-128 to ensure efficient data confidentiality, integrity and authentication with low computation load, which makes it suitable for resourceconstrained IoT devices. Encrypted data are securely stored in the cloud while the data integrity and traceability of the SHA-256 hash values are ensured by being stored on the blockchain, making them irretrievable. Encrypted data are stored securely in the cloud, while the data integrity and traceability of the hash value ensure irretrievable storage through the blockchain. The proposed framework was implemented using IBM Quantum Qiskit, ASCON-128, blockchain platforms and cloud storage. Experimental results show that quantum bit error rate (QBER) varies from 2.1% to 3.5% for typical communication and 24.8% for eavesdropping attempts, proving reliable QKD. ASCON encryption range was between 8.2 ms and 69.5 ms, and blockchain verification was less than 25 ms for 1,000 transactions with more than 99% of the integrity accuracy. Moreover, the framework achieved an attack detection rate higher than 97.9% in several cyberattacks and hence provided a scalable, light-weight and quantum resistant security solution for next generation IoT ecosystems.
Industrial Internet of Things (IIoT), a core enabler of Industry 4.0, is evolving rapidly to tackle the challenges imposed by explosive real-time manufacturing data in the context of Internet and telecommunication industry. 5G technology is the key to addressing such challenges. This is done by bypassing upper authentication protocols and supporting small data transmission during initial access, which, however, causes serious security breaches in IIoT device authentication. To solve this, in this article propose a secure cross-layer authentication framework based on quantum walk on circles. The system performs random hash coding on multidomain physical-layer resources to encode and decode device identifiers securely, while using a quantum walk based privacy-preserving protocol to maintain code privacy at arbitrary high level, being controlled by the number of occupied physical resources. The upper bound of decoding errors is derived and a nonconvex integer programming problem of minimizing the bound is formulated to characterize the security performance. The space of one-time keys for encryption is also derived that show how high privacy and scalability advantage is maintained against classical and quantum computers. Finally, we derive novel expressions of failure probability of this new authentication system and numerically show that our scheme can bring ultrahigh level of security and privacy protection with low latency despite attack.
Internet of Things acts an essential role in our everyday lives and it definitely has the potential to grow on the importance and revolutionize our future. However, the present communication technologies have several security related issues which is required to provide secure end to end connectivity among services. Moreover, due to recent, rapid growth of quantum technologies, most common security mechanisms considered secure today may be soon imperilled. Thus, the modern security mechanisms during their construction also require the power of quantum technologies to resist various potential attacks from quantum computers. Because of its characteristics, quantum walks (QW) is considered as a universal quantum computation paradigm that can be accepted as an excellent key generator. In this regard, in this paper a new lightweight image encryption scheme based on QW for secure data transfer in the internet of things platforms and wireless networking with edge computing is proposed. The introduced approach utilises the power of nonlinear dynamic behaviour of QW to construct permutation boxes and generates pseudo-random numbers for encrypting the plain image after dividing it into blocks. The results of the conducted simulation and numerical analyses confirm that the presented encryption algorithm is effective. The encrypted images have randomness properties, no useful data about the ciphered image can be obtained via analysing the correlation of adjacent pixels. Moreover, the entropy value is close to 8, the number of the pixel change rate is greater than 99.61%, and there is high sensitivity of the key parameters with large key space to resist various attacks.
The explosive growth of Industrial Internet of Things (IIoT) technologies has been reshaping manufacturing, energy, transportation and infrastructure with real-time monitoring and automation supported by predictive analytics. The more interconnected machines are, the more vulnerable they become to advanced cyberattacks. RSA and ECC are two of the dominant cryptographic algorithms that 60% of the IIoT communications today. They are still susceptible to quantum computing attacks, especially from Shor, which can easily break public-key encryption. This new risk, and the threat it represents, calls for a monitoring of the quantum situation by adding Post Quantum Cryptography (PQC) to guarantee data privacy and resilient systems. This work studies the quantum-empowered security approach to IIoT environment and considers lattice-based, hash-based and code-based cryptography techniques immune to quantum attacks. This paper investigates the industrial system design demands, identifies some of these weaknesses, and presents a secure communication architecture including post-quantum cryptography for device authentication, secure firmware updates and data encryption. Studies show that due to constraints in resources, triage for IIoT devices is difficult, especially because of limitations of processors, among others; latency and scalability are two issues. The approach proposed showcases a means for industrial cybersecurity to benefit from post-quantum cryptography without losing efficiency.
The rapid proliferation of Consumer-Centric Internet of Things (CCIoT) devices has resulted in massive volumes of data being generated and transmitted across edge and cloud infrastructures. However, limited computational and memory resources, coupled with the vulnerabilities of open communication networks, expose CCIoT ecosystems to severe security threats. With the advent of quantum computing, traditional cryptographic schemes risk becoming obsolete, necessitating the integration of quantum cryptography into edge-assisted CCIoT protocols. In this paper, we propose a blockchain-enabled quantum-designated verifier signature protocol designed to ensure secure data transmission and storage within CCIoT networks. The protocol leverages a private blockchain, where peer nodes generate blocks from service-provider data, thereby enhancing confidentiality and integrity. Informal security verification and informal analysis confirm the robustness of the scheme against both classical and quantum adversaries. Extensive experiments, implemented in Python, evaluate the proposed quantum signature protocol theoretically and practically. The results demonstrate strong encryption performance, achieving a computational cost of 41.5 ms and communication overhead of 834 bits, outperforming recent benchmark schemes. The findings highlight the superior reliability, scalability, and efficiency of our approach, offering a viable quantum security solution for future CCIoT ecosystems.