article · IEEE Access
Rapid expansion of the Internet of Things faces major security challenges, particularly as advancements in quantum computing threaten conventional cryptographic safeguards. To address these vulnerabilities, a lightweight image encryption scheme employs quantum walks to secure data transfer across Internet of Things platforms, wireless networking, and edge computing architectures. The method exploits the nonlinear dynamic behaviour of quantum walks to construct permutation boxes and generate pseudo-random numbers that encrypt plain images divided into blocks. Simulation and numerical evaluations demonstrate that the encrypted images display strong randomness properties, ensuring no meaningful information can be derived from adjacent pixel correlations. The resulting ciphered outputs achieve an entropy value near 8, a pixel change rate exceeding 99.61 percent, and high parameter sensitivity over a large key space to counter quantum attacks.
Emerging quantum computing capabilities pose a significant threat to the security protocols currently safeguarding everyday connected devices. By employing quantum walk dynamics to protect transmitted imagery, this approach offers a defence against future quantum-powered cyber attacks, helping maintain privacy and operational integrity across digital infrastructure, edge networks, and distributed sensor environments.
This technology is relevant to connected hardware manufacturers, network operators, and security software providers handling data transfer across edge computing and Internet of Things ecosystems. Based on the abstract, the method is at an applied research stage, validated via simulation and numerical analysis. Real-world commercial deployment would require subsequent implementation and benchmarking on actual resource-constrained edge devices and operational wireless networks.
AI-generated from the published abstract. Always read the original work before citing.
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.
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DOI: 10.1109/access.2020.2992820
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