A self-adjusting quantum key renewal management scheme in classical network symmetric cryptography

Abstract

Quantum private communication is a technology for secure communication that uses the laws of quantum mechanics to distribute quantum keys for encryption. Currently it has been widely used in the classical network symmetric cryptography environments. When we perform encrypted transmission of Internet multimedia data by using quantum keys, it is important to make full use of the characteristics of the quantum key in its renewal and consumption management. Researchers have already proposed a number of solutions. In this article, a novel self-adjusting quantum key renewal management scheme is proposed. It uses the detected quantum network status information of the QBER, which is also related to the final quantum key generation rate in the quantum network. A sliding window mechanism is introduced to manage quantum key renewal rate. The quantum key is then used as the secret key for classic encryption algorithms such as AES to encrypt network traffic. A set of experiments were performed in a real QKD environments to show that, compared with current quantum key renewal management schemes, the proposed scheme allows the dynamic management of quantum key renewal rate and it can effectively enhance network security and improve the security of existing Internet multimedia data transmission.