Quantum communication in distributed wireless sensor networks

In the wireless sensor networks (WSNs), sensor nodes may be deployed in the hostile areas. The eavesdropper can intercept the messages in the public channel and the communication between the nodes is easily monitored. Furthermore, any malicious intermediate node can act as a legal receiver to alter the passing messages. Hence, message protection and sensor node identification become important issues in WSN. In this paper, we propose a novel scheme providing unconditional secure communication based on the quantum characteristics, including no-cloning and teleportation. We present a random EPR-pair allocation scheme that is designed to overcome the vulnerability caused by possible compromised nodes. EPR pairs are pre-assigned to sensor nodes randomly and the entangled qubits are used by the nodes with the quantum teleportation scheme to form a secure link. We also show a scheme on how to resist the man-in-the-middle attack. In the framework, the qubits are allocated to each node before deployment and the adversary is unable to create the duplicated nodes. Even if the malicious nodes are added to the network to falsify the messages transmitting in the public channel, the legal nodes can easily detect the fake nodes that have no entangled qubits and verify the counterfeit messages. In addition, we prove that one node sharing EPR pairs with a certain amount of neighbor nodes can teleport information to any node in the sensor network if there are sufficient EPR pairs in the qubits pool. The proposal shows that the distributed quantum wireless sensor network gains better security than classical wireless sensor network and centralized quantum wireless network.