Quantum Key Distribution and Cryptography Mechanisms for Cloud Data Security

Providing security to the Personal Health Record (PHR) stored in cloud is an important and critical task in recent days. Different cloud security mechanisms are developed in the traditional works for this purpose mainly focused on authentication based security. This paper aims to develop a novel key distribution and encryption mechanism namely, Quantum Key Distribution and Non-Abelian Encryption (QKD-NAE) for secure storage and access of PHR. In cloud environment, the hospital admin and user uses a quantum key for data access, where the users may be a doctor, patient, nurse, physicians, and accountants. The hospital admin uses the Diffie Hellman (DH) algorithm for secure secret generation, and every user separates the secret based on their designation. Then, the admin splits the input data into attributes and encrypts it by using NAE. When the user sends the request to the service provider, the access control policy maintained by the Third Party Auditor (TPA) is verified for data access. The valid user receives the data from multiple servers based on the access control policy created by the DH algorithm. The major advantage of this work is that the unauthorized users are not able to know the quantum key and the generated secret which leads to increased data security. The experimental results evaluate the performance of the existing and proposed techniques with respect to different measures.