Enhancing the Security of Multi-agent Networked Control Systems Using QKD based Homomorphic Encryption

Abstract

The cyber-security of multi-agent control systems has become vital in practice. To protect the communication process between the individual agents over TCP/IP networks, one must encrypt the messages to be sent, which is costly in a large-scale network when high-level security is demanded. To lessen the burden of heavy encryption and decryption processes, we introduce the Homomorphic Encryption to reduce the number of encryption/decryption terminals that are supposed to equip with every agent. The security is enhanced by the quantum key distribution technology, which can generate secret keys that are theoretically absolutely secure even against quantum computation. We proposed a hybrid method that make good use of the randomness of quantum keys, one-time pad and symmetric encryption to make sure the overall security of homomorphic encryption algorithms. Numerical simulations are provided to illustrate how our scheme.