Information-Theoretic Secure Key Sharing for Wide-Area Mobile Applications

TL;DR

This paper introduces a quantum-resistant key sharing scheme for wide-area IoT applications, combining quantum key distribution and channel reciprocity to ensure secure communication even against unbounded adversaries.

Contribution

It proposes the CR-QKD scheme that integrates QKD and CR-based key generation, extending it to multi-user scenarios and enhancing practicality through delay reduction and rate improvement.

Findings

Achieved a secret key rate of 424 bits/sec in a metropolitan network

Demonstrated secure key sharing over 15 km distance

Reduced time delay in key generation process

Abstract

With the rapid growth of handheld devices in the internet of things (IoT) networks, mobile applications have become ubiquitous in everyday life. As technology is developed, so do also the risks and threats associated with it, especially in the forthcoming quantum era. Existing IoT networks, however, lack a quantum-resistant secret key sharing scheme to meet confidential message transmission demands in wide-area mobile applications. To address this issue, this article proposes a new scheme, channel reciprocity (CR) based quantum key distribution (QKD) CR-QKD, which accomplishes the goal of secret key sharing by combining emerging techniques of QKD and CR-based key generation (CRKG). Exploiting laws of quantum physics and properties of wireless channels, the proposed scheme is able to ensure the secrecy of the key, even against computationally unbounded adversaries. The basic mechanism is elaborated for a single-user case and it is extended into a multi-user case by redesigning a multi-user edge forwarding strategy. In addition, to make CR-QKD more practical, some enhancement strategies are studied to reduce the time delay and to improve the secret key generation rate in a secure manner. A prototype of CR-QKD is demonstrated in a metropolitan area network, where secret keys are shared between two remote IoT devices that are roughly fifteen kilometers apart from each other. The experimental results have verified that CR-QKD allows a secret key rate of 424 bits per second with a retransmission rate of 2.1%.