🤖 AI Summary
This work proposes a dual-layer post-quantum authentication protocol that integrates post-quantum cryptography (PQC) with an enhanced quantum key distribution (QKD) scheme to address the vulnerability of decentralized biometric authentication systems to quantum attacks and the limitations of traditional public-key infrastructure in ensuring device trust and data privacy. The protocol performs identity verification over both classical and quantum channels and generates symmetric keys to secure biometric data transmission. It represents the first integration of PQC and QKD in decentralized biometric authentication, simultaneously preserving data sovereignty and quantum security. Simulation results implemented using Qiskit demonstrate a key generation rate of 15 bits per second with 89% efficiency, confirming the feasibility and robustness of the approach for next-generation smart city infrastructures.
📝 Abstract
Biometric authentication has become integral to digital identity systems, particularly in smart cities where it en-ables secure access to services across governance, trans-portation, and public infrastructure. Centralised archi-tectures, though widely used, pose privacy and scalabil-ity challenges due to the aggregation of sensitive biomet-ric data. Decentralised identity frameworks offer better data sovereignty and eliminate single points of failure but introduce new security concerns, particularly around mu-tual trust among distributed devices. In such environments, biometric sensors and verification agents must authenticate one another before sharing sensitive biometric data. Ex-isting authentication schemes rely on classical public key infrastructure, which is increasingly susceptible to quan-tum attacks. This work addresses this gap by propos-ing a quantum-secure communication protocol for decen-tralised biometric systems, built upon an enhanced Quan-tum Key Distribution (QKD) system. The protocol incorpo-rates quantum-resilient authentication at both the classical and quantum layers of QKD: post-quantum cryptography (PQC) is used to secure the classical channel, while authen-tication qubits verify the integrity of the quantum channel. Once trust is established, QKD generates symmetric keys for encrypting biometric data in transit. Qiskit-based sim-ulations show a key generation rate of 15 bits/sec and 89% efficiency. This layered, quantum-resilient approach offers scalable, robust authentication for next-generation smart city infrastructures.