Implementation of Quantum Key Distribution with Elliptic Curve Cryptography

The ever-expanding world of fog computing, where data processing happens closer to devices, demands robust security measures. This paper proposes a robust and lightweight security approach for reliable and secure communication in fog computing environments, ensuring data confidentiality, integrity, and resilience against emerging cyber threats using Elliptic Curve Diffie–Hellman (ECDH), hybrid encapsulation mechanism (HEM), and quantum key distribution (QKD). The shared and private keys are generated using ECDH and the data are encrypted using HEM, a novel encapsulation mechanism that uses advanced encryption standard (AES) and then transmitted over a classical channel, potentially offering a balance between security and efficiency. The shared keys are exchanged among the fog nodes over a quantum channel using QKD, an efficient quantum key exchange mechanism. QKD leverages the principles of quantum mechanics to exchange shared secret keys between parties. ECC efficiently generates encryption keys for securing data. These keys offer provable security, meaning they cannot be cracked by even the most powerful computers. This not only safeguards sensitive information but also fosters trust and facilitates collaboration among fog nodes. The efficiency of the proposed approach is computed in terms of execution time, computation cost, key size, and key strength. We compared our proposed approach with existing approaches and we observed that the proposed approach outperforms the existing approaches.