Quantum cryptography based solution for secure and efficient key management for e-Governance in India

摘要

Secure key distribution is the fundamental problem in traditional symmetric key cryptography. Many techniques came into existence to safeguard key distribution. The core functionality of a key management technique is to share a secret key between two parties in secure and efficient fashion. This is the most important concern when cryptography is integrated with a communication network. Adversaries can exploit vulnerabilities in key management mechanism. Quantum key distribution is a promising technique that ensures unconditionally secure distribution of a bit string, a secret key, between two end points. Since quantum cannot be cloned or split, it can be used for providing fool proof mechanism for secure and efficient key management. This paper proposes a novel key management framework with underlying customized protocols to form a quantum trusted network that serve e-Governance applications in India. The custom protocols help to overcome the point-to-point limitation of quantum besides curbing security loopholes for reliable and provably secure communications. Quantum device provided by "Quantum in Cloud" of University of Bristol is used for the empirical study of the proposed framework.