Have you ever been in a situation where you were away from your home, and then you suddenly realize that you had forgotten to put off the light back in your home and wondered what to be done? Well, now as technology has advanced, it’s just a finger touch away coz the light bulb can now be switched off using a smartphone app. This recently advanced technology is better known by the name of Internet of Things (IoT).
Why the name Internet of Things??
We all know that it is only because of the Internet that we are easily able to connect to people who are miles away from us. So, if we say in simple terms the Internet was invented to establish a connection between humans. As years passed by, people started thinking of how it would be if simple devices, the devices which otherwise are considered to be dumb could be connected in a similar manner. This concept formed to be the basis for the advent of the Internet of Things.
Putting this concept in the form of a definition, we can say that the Internet of Things is connecting several physical devices around the world to the internet and sharing the data. Connecting up all these different objects and adding sensors to them adds a level of digital intelligence to these devices, thus enabling them to communicate in real-time without human interference.
All this while, we have been discussing what IoT is along with which we understood a lot of its merits.
Talking about the other side of IoT, we have seen that IoT requires the sharing of data, and this can lead to privacy issues if not handled in a proper manner. Now the question that may arise is how we can solve this privacy issue? Well, we all know that the type of cryptography we use currently is classical cryptography.
Classical Cryptography in Brief.
In classical cryptography, the original data (plain text) is converted to the encoded format (cipher text). A data string known as key controls the conversion of plain text into cipher text. Without this key, no one will be able to read the data. The widely used encryption technique is the One-Time Pad (OTP) which is said to be unbreakable. But now the eavesdroppers have found new techniques to break this so called unbreakable technique. That’s where the researchers felt the need of finding out a better cryptographic technique specially for a complex system like IoT.
And this is how Quantum Cryptography gets into the scenario.
A very basic aspect of quantum cryptography is Quantum Key Distribution (QKD)
followed by the two laws of quantum mechanics which is Quantum Entanglement
and Quantum Teleportation. This eventually forms the master brain
of the cryptographic technique.
Quantum Key Distribution.
It is a secure communication method which enables two parties to produce a shared random secret key known only to them to encrypt and decrypt the messages. An important and unique property of quantum key distribution is the ability of the two communicating users to detect the presence of any third party trying to gain knowledge of the key.
Quantum Entanglement.
Consider two or more photons which are an infinite distance apart from each other, if the quantum mechanical properties of each element is dependant on the quantum mechanical properties of other photons then the photons are said to be entangled quantum mechanically.
Quantum Teleportation.
This allows a party to send a qubit or quantum bit (basic unit of quantum information) to another entangled party without actually sending the qubit over the channel.
Moving on to how this quantum cryptography can be implemented in IoT…
There are 3 layers (perception layer, network layer, application layer) in an IoT system. The system on which we would be implementing this has an additional layer ‘Quantum Security layer’. This channel only protects the security key. The other layers communicate in between using the same classical approach. This additional layer is introduced before the application layer. The quantum cryptographic protocol used here is the BB84 protocol.
Though it looks simple, the implementation is still said to be difficult since the photons can easily be distorted by the environmental factors. Also, quantum devices are very big, bulky, and expensive. And the quantum systems used in the commercial use for IoT is a big challenge as the quantum apparatus is expensive and cannot be afforded by every organization.
Yet, we can expect this to be implemented in the near future so that people can share any of their data without any fear!!!
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