Secure Quantum Steganography Protocol for Fog Cloud Internet of Things

Abstract

The security of sensitive information is an urgent need in today's communication, principally in cloud and Internet of Things (IoT) environments. Therefore, a well-designed security mechanism should be carefully considered. This paper presents a new framework for secure information in fog cloud IoT. In the framework, the user in one location embeds his/her valuable data via the proposed quantum steganography protocol and uploads the covered data to the fog cloud. The intended receiver in another location accesses the data from the fog cloud and extracts the intended content via the proposed extraction approach. This paper also presents a novel quantum steganography protocol based on hash function and quantum entangled states. To the best of our knowledge, there is no prior quantum steganography protocol that authenticates an embedded secret message. In the suggested protocol, the hash function is utilized to authenticate embedded secret messages. The presented protocol is secure against well-known attacks, such as message, man-in-the-middle, and no-message attacks. In addition, it does not consume additional channels besides the proposed one to send a secret message or verify security. The proposed approach is nominated for use in fog and mobile edge computing.