Challenges
Datasets
Workspaces
Papers
Discussions
Leaderboard
Log inSign up
Challenges
Datasets
Workspaces
Papers
Discussions
Leaderboard
Blog
Job Board
Q3AS

© 2026 Aqora Quantum S.A.S.

TermsPrivacyLegal Notice

IETE Journal of Research

Improved Mutual Authentication in the Quantum Key Agreement through the HMAC-augmented BB84 Scheme in WBSN Architecture

Debdatta Chatterjee, Shanvendra Rai, Subhasish Banerjee

Published Feb 18, 2026• 0 citations
Publisher

Abstract

The incorporation of wireless body sensor networks (WBSNs) in medical applications has increased widely in recent years. WBSN provide an effective way to monitor patients’ health data remotely, and they also help to maintain social distancing. Hence, data safety is the utmost concern for maintaining the integrity of sensitive data as these risks can lead towards the life-threatening conditions of the patients, as well. To maintain the required level of security, many traditional cryptographic measures are currently in use; however, they cannot provide the same level of security in the quantum era. Therefore, in this paper, an augmented BB84 quantum cryptography protocol is proposed for secure key generation and distribution between two participating entities in a quantum environment. In addition, to preserve the legitimacy of the users, a hash-based message authentication code (HMAC) is incorporated into the proposed model. Through different analysis including security, key generation time, multiple error rate analysis, and performance analysis, it is evident that the proposed model provides prominent security against DoS attack, replay attack, quantum attack, and known plaintext attack. Moreover, the key generation time (ms) is reduced by 89.38% compared to the existing quantum key agreement scheme. In addition, it achieves an average execution time (ms) for evaluating the protocol at different error rates like 1%, 5%, and 10%, are 0.0198%, 0.0736%, and 0.0385%, respectively, for different key lengths (KB). This demonstrates the robustness, reliability, and security tolerance of the proposed scheme under varying channel noise and attack conditions.

DOI
10.1080/03772063.2026.2625875

Related papers

A Hybrid Cryptosystem with MAC-Integrated Lattice-Based Quantum Encryption for Secure Communication in WBSNs

A wireless, wearable human body sensor network.Sensor modules are implanted within the human body, on the body surface, and in garments to check the health of the patient at regular intervals for remote treatment and monitoring.Wireless body sensor networks (WBSN) have applications such as healthcare, military, sports, and remote treatment.It creates better quality of human life with accurate, faster disease diagnosis and time-gap treatment and better treatment.The existing cryptographic protocols are plagued with the drawback of vulnerability to attacks and resource efficiency.The scheme under proposal was a combination of symmetric as well as asymmetric cryptographic protocols to provide an effective hybrid authentication for WBSN.Message authentication code (MAC) is a symmetric key cryptographic protocol for authentication of communicators.It has been deliberated in the proposed approach for authentication verification of registration data.Enhanced lattice-based quantum cryptography (ILBQC) is a cryptographic method, which is asymmetric in order to verify human body-sensed physiological data authentication.ILBQC uses a new lattice-based quantum cryptography approach for key generation, encryption, and decryption.Thus, the proposed method uses plaintext partitioning, double encryption, and decryption scheme in an attempt to validate secure authentication in WBSN.Performance of the suggested MAC-ILBQC method is measured in terms of key generation time, encryption time, decryption time, memory usage, overall execution time, energy expense, and resistance against attack.

National Journal Of Antennas And Propagation•Jul 1, 2025•0 citations

Lattice-Based Quantum Cryptography Technique for High-Security Authentication in WBSNs

Kenchali Shivaji Rao, Bhuvaneswari R, Rajendran P +2 more

Wireless Body Sensor Networks (WBSNs) have rapidly developed to allow real-time health monitoring and remote medical diagnostics with better patient care. However, due to the sensitive nature of the data transferred within WBSNs, more integrated security mechanisms are mandatory, especially against possible attacks by both classical and quantum adversaries. The developments in quantum computing may break the conventional encryption schemes, so it is very important to explore quantum-resistant systems. The paper proposes a new scheme for lattice-based high-security authentication in WBSNs. Lattice-based cryptography provides post-quantum security as it has inherent resistance against quantum attacks and assumptions about the hardness of the computational problem, especially the Learning with Errors problem and the SVP. The architecture proposed strengthens defenses against man-in-the-middle, impersonation, and eavesdropping attacks by authenticating and ensuring that a safe key exchange takes place and that data integrity is achieved. It analyzes the performance, security overhead, and energy economy of LBQC to make sure it is appropriate for such low-power, low-resource contexts. The experimental outcomes validate the applicability of this technique, highlighting how well it will protect WBSNs against attacks from methods developed by quantum computing, and, at the same time, the system will remain resilient and the data confidential.

IEEE International Symposium on Sustainable Energy, Signal Processing and Cyber Security (iSSSC)•Nov 6, 2025•1 citation

Quantum Cryptography Techniques for Enhancing Security in IoT Communications

Suresh Bysani Venkata Naga, Arnav Kotiyal, R.S.S. Raju Battula +3 more

A system of wirelessly communicative sensors embedded in a person's clothing. In order to remotely monitor and treat a patient's health, sensor devices are embedded in clothing, skin, and the human body itself. Healthcare, the military, sports, and remote treatment are just a few of the modern WBSN applications. It improves people's quality of life by allowing for more precise and quicker disease diagnosis as well as more timely care and more effective treatment. Even if a patient is far away from medical care, WBSN can still save their life. Despite the numerous benefits that WBSN technology brings to healthcare systems, there are legitimate concerns about security and privacy when it comes to collecting and transmitting physiological data about humans in an open setting. Ensuring the security of physiological data during transmission in a wireless environment is a challenging but crucial task. Key distribution, authentication, data integrity, and data confidentiality are just a few of the many security issues plaguing the WBSN. In tackling the WBSN security issues, this research contributes significantly. Secure transmission in wireless networks and high attack resistance are both provided by the cryptographic computational process. Nevertheless, the unsecure transmission of keys across networks is the sole vulnerability of public and private key cryptography methods. Attackers can easily crack traditional key sharing protocols used by communicating parties. Intruders can compromise the system's security in its entirety if they obtain the secret key. In WBSN, a secure way to generate and distribute secret keys is required. The EBB84QCP is a method for creating and sharing secret keys between communicating parties. Rather than using two prime numbers, the Enhanced and Modified RSA Cryptosystem (EMRSACS) suggests using four prime numbers for key generation, encryption, and decryption. Data transmission in wireless networks still involves a secret quantum key that is used for encryption and decryption of human body sense. The robust secrecy of WBSN is guaranteed by these two improved parameters: four prime numbers and a secret quantum key. Key generation, encryption, decryption, and overall execution time are all significantly longer with the suggested method compared to RSA. It uses more power and memory than is necessary for RSA.

International Conference on Distributed Systems, Computer Networks and Cybersecurity (ICDSCNC)•Sep 20, 2024•0 citations

Post-Quantum Attribute-Based Authenticated Key Agreement Protocol for Smart Healthcare

Liang Ni, Bingke Gu, Xiaoyan Liu +1 more

With the digitization and networking of medical and health data, intelligent medical devices are widely used to monitor patient health status and provide personalized medical services. However, these devices involve a large amount of personal health data and must ensure data security. The data security and privacy protection in the new complex network environment has become one of the important challenges in the field of healthcare. This study aims to propose a post quantum attribute based authentication key agreement protocol applicable to intelligent healthcare, to address the security risks and risks of medical data communication under traditional cryptographic systems. This new protocol is based on attribute authentication encryption technology without certificates on the grid, which completes mutual authentication and establishes secure communication through attribute and access control policies, and can optimize the deployment of certificate system components in public key infrastructure. Meanwhile, this scheme belongs to the post quantum cryptography protocol and has the ability to resist quantum computing attacks. Based on comprehensive analysis, this scheme can achieve certain advantages in execution efficiency and security, and can provide a more reliable choice for secure communication in the field of intelligent healthcare.

International Conference on Big Data Engineering (BDE)•Jul 24, 2024•0 citations

A novel security enhancement mechanism in wireless body area networks using quantum cryptography

K. R. Siva Bharathi, Rajamanickam Venkateswari

The rapid advancements in miniature electronics, wireless networks, and sensor networks, and embedded computing have revolutionized all real-time application scenarios. One such most obligatory application at present is remote health care. This is made possible via Wireless Body Area Networks (WBANs), hopeful in remote health care and assistance. These networks carry personal as well as life-critical information of the users. Hence stringent security mechanisms are required to safeguard these data from intruders. This paper presents a high-level security mechanism based on quantum cryptography for WBANs. A brief comparison of its performance with the enhanced BB84 QKD protocol in terms of efficiency and time complexity analysis. The efficiency and complexity order of the proposed EB92 protocol turned out to be 29% and 2, respectively in contrast to the existing EBB84 which resulted in 42% and 2.86 of the same. Furthermore, the security analysis is done concerning the Time-shift quantum attack.

IET conference proceedings.•Apr 12, 2022•1 citation

Controlled Authentication Semi-Quantum Key Agreement Protocol for the Internet of Medical Things

Yefeng He, Liaoyuan Shen, Yichi Zhang

Abstract In the Internet of Medical Things (IoMT), sensors automatically collect data and transmit it to hospital servers, where doctors provide professional medical advice. The emergence of IoMT has significantly reduced the burden on chronic-disease patients and improved their life security. However, the transmission of patients’ medical data still faces serious confidentiality and integrity risks. This paper proposes a novel healthcare-system architecture that integrates a controlled-authentication semi-quantum key-negotiation (SQKN) protocol, leveraging the unconditional security of quantum cryptography to mitigate potential data attacks. The hospital server acts as a trusted controller that supervises every protocol run and authenticates all participants, which effectively thwarts man-in-the-middle and identity-spoofing attacks. The semi-quantum design further minimizes the quantum-device burden on patients’ side. Experimental simulation under realistic noise (QBER ≈ 0.03 at 0.02/0.04 noise level, 3 000 shots) shows the protocol keeps the quantum-bit error rate below 3 %, while the overall key-generation efficiency reaches 92 %, demonstrating that the scheme resists known attacks and maintains high quantum efficiency for safeguarding IoMT data security.

Quantum Information and Computation•Mar 1, 2026•0 citations
The incorporation of wireless body sensor networks (WBSNs) in medical applications has increased widely in recent years. WBSN provide an effective way to monitor patients’ health data remotely, and they also help to maintain social distancing. Hence, data safety is the utmost concern for maintaining the integrity of sensitive data as these risks can lead towards the life-threatening conditions of the patients, as well. To maintain the required level of security, many traditional cryptographic measures are currently in use; however, they cannot provide the same level of security in the quantum era. Therefore, in this paper, an augmented BB84 quantum cryptography protocol is proposed for secure key generation and distribution between two participating entities in a quantum environment. In addition, to preserve the legitimacy of the users, a hash-based message authentication code (HMAC) is incorporated into the proposed model. Through different analysis including security, key generation time, multiple error rate analysis, and performance analysis, it is evident that the proposed model provides prominent security against DoS attack, replay attack, quantum attack, and known plaintext attack. Moreover, the key generation time (ms) is reduced by 89.38% compared to the existing quantum key agreement scheme. In addition, it achieves an average execution time (ms) for evaluating the protocol at different error rates like 1%, 5%, and 10%, are 0.0198%, 0.0736%, and 0.0385%, respectively, for different key lengths (KB). This demonstrates the robustness, reliability, and security tolerance of the proposed scheme under varying channel noise and attack conditions.
A wireless, wearable human body sensor network.Sensor modules are implanted within the human body, on the body surface, and in garments to check the health of the patient at regular intervals for remote treatment and monitoring.Wireless body sensor networks (WBSN) have applications such as healthcare, military, sports, and remote treatment.It creates better quality of human life with accurate, faster disease diagnosis and time-gap treatment and better treatment.The existing cryptographic protocols are plagued with the drawback of vulnerability to attacks and resource efficiency.The scheme under proposal was a combination of symmetric as well as asymmetric cryptographic protocols to provide an effective hybrid authentication for WBSN.Message authentication code (MAC) is a symmetric key cryptographic protocol for authentication of communicators.It has been deliberated in the proposed approach for authentication verification of registration data.Enhanced lattice-based quantum cryptography (ILBQC) is a cryptographic method, which is asymmetric in order to verify human body-sensed physiological data authentication.ILBQC uses a new lattice-based quantum cryptography approach for key generation, encryption, and decryption.Thus, the proposed method uses plaintext partitioning, double encryption, and decryption scheme in an attempt to validate secure authentication in WBSN.Performance of the suggested MAC-ILBQC method is measured in terms of key generation time, encryption time, decryption time, memory usage, overall execution time, energy expense, and resistance against attack.
Wireless Body Sensor Networks (WBSNs) have rapidly developed to allow real-time health monitoring and remote medical diagnostics with better patient care. However, due to the sensitive nature of the data transferred within WBSNs, more integrated security mechanisms are mandatory, especially against possible attacks by both classical and quantum adversaries. The developments in quantum computing may break the conventional encryption schemes, so it is very important to explore quantum-resistant systems. The paper proposes a new scheme for lattice-based high-security authentication in WBSNs. Lattice-based cryptography provides post-quantum security as it has inherent resistance against quantum attacks and assumptions about the hardness of the computational problem, especially the Learning with Errors problem and the SVP. The architecture proposed strengthens defenses against man-in-the-middle, impersonation, and eavesdropping attacks by authenticating and ensuring that a safe key exchange takes place and that data integrity is achieved. It analyzes the performance, security overhead, and energy economy of LBQC to make sure it is appropriate for such low-power, low-resource contexts. The experimental outcomes validate the applicability of this technique, highlighting how well it will protect WBSNs against attacks from methods developed by quantum computing, and, at the same time, the system will remain resilient and the data confidential.
A system of wirelessly communicative sensors embedded in a person's clothing. In order to remotely monitor and treat a patient's health, sensor devices are embedded in clothing, skin, and the human body itself. Healthcare, the military, sports, and remote treatment are just a few of the modern WBSN applications. It improves people's quality of life by allowing for more precise and quicker disease diagnosis as well as more timely care and more effective treatment. Even if a patient is far away from medical care, WBSN can still save their life. Despite the numerous benefits that WBSN technology brings to healthcare systems, there are legitimate concerns about security and privacy when it comes to collecting and transmitting physiological data about humans in an open setting. Ensuring the security of physiological data during transmission in a wireless environment is a challenging but crucial task. Key distribution, authentication, data integrity, and data confidentiality are just a few of the many security issues plaguing the WBSN. In tackling the WBSN security issues, this research contributes significantly. Secure transmission in wireless networks and high attack resistance are both provided by the cryptographic computational process. Nevertheless, the unsecure transmission of keys across networks is the sole vulnerability of public and private key cryptography methods. Attackers can easily crack traditional key sharing protocols used by communicating parties. Intruders can compromise the system's security in its entirety if they obtain the secret key. In WBSN, a secure way to generate and distribute secret keys is required. The EBB84QCP is a method for creating and sharing secret keys between communicating parties. Rather than using two prime numbers, the Enhanced and Modified RSA Cryptosystem (EMRSACS) suggests using four prime numbers for key generation, encryption, and decryption. Data transmission in wireless networks still involves a secret quantum key that is used for encryption and decryption of human body sense. The robust secrecy of WBSN is guaranteed by these two improved parameters: four prime numbers and a secret quantum key. Key generation, encryption, decryption, and overall execution time are all significantly longer with the suggested method compared to RSA. It uses more power and memory than is necessary for RSA.
With the digitization and networking of medical and health data, intelligent medical devices are widely used to monitor patient health status and provide personalized medical services. However, these devices involve a large amount of personal health data and must ensure data security. The data security and privacy protection in the new complex network environment has become one of the important challenges in the field of healthcare. This study aims to propose a post quantum attribute based authentication key agreement protocol applicable to intelligent healthcare, to address the security risks and risks of medical data communication under traditional cryptographic systems. This new protocol is based on attribute authentication encryption technology without certificates on the grid, which completes mutual authentication and establishes secure communication through attribute and access control policies, and can optimize the deployment of certificate system components in public key infrastructure. Meanwhile, this scheme belongs to the post quantum cryptography protocol and has the ability to resist quantum computing attacks. Based on comprehensive analysis, this scheme can achieve certain advantages in execution efficiency and security, and can provide a more reliable choice for secure communication in the field of intelligent healthcare.
The rapid advancements in miniature electronics, wireless networks, and sensor networks, and embedded computing have revolutionized all real-time application scenarios. One such most obligatory application at present is remote health care. This is made possible via Wireless Body Area Networks (WBANs), hopeful in remote health care and assistance. These networks carry personal as well as life-critical information of the users. Hence stringent security mechanisms are required to safeguard these data from intruders. This paper presents a high-level security mechanism based on quantum cryptography for WBANs. A brief comparison of its performance with the enhanced BB84 QKD protocol in terms of efficiency and time complexity analysis. The efficiency and complexity order of the proposed EB92 protocol turned out to be 29% and 2, respectively in contrast to the existing EBB84 which resulted in 42% and 2.86 of the same. Furthermore, the security analysis is done concerning the Time-shift quantum attack.
Abstract In the Internet of Medical Things (IoMT), sensors automatically collect data and transmit it to hospital servers, where doctors provide professional medical advice. The emergence of IoMT has significantly reduced the burden on chronic-disease patients and improved their life security. However, the transmission of patients’ medical data still faces serious confidentiality and integrity risks. This paper proposes a novel healthcare-system architecture that integrates a controlled-authentication semi-quantum key-negotiation (SQKN) protocol, leveraging the unconditional security of quantum cryptography to mitigate potential data attacks. The hospital server acts as a trusted controller that supervises every protocol run and authenticates all participants, which effectively thwarts man-in-the-middle and identity-spoofing attacks. The semi-quantum design further minimizes the quantum-device burden on patients’ side. Experimental simulation under realistic noise (QBER ≈ 0.03 at 0.02/0.04 noise level, 3 000 shots) shows the protocol keeps the quantum-bit error rate below 3 %, while the overall key-generation efficiency reaches 92 %, demonstrating that the scheme resists known attacks and maintains high quantum efficiency for safeguarding IoMT data security.