A hybrid quantum key distribution protocol for tele-care medicine information systems

The Internet has become an increasingly appealing medium for telecare medicine information systems (TMISs). However, the open nature of the Internet poses serious security threats and vulnerabilities to TMISs and privacy concerns to the patients and medical personnel. This work proposes a hybrid quantum key distribution protocol to provide security in TMISs, leveraging the key agreement of classical and quantum key distribution. Our protocol induces low energy and computation overheads to achieve privacy and trusted operations for TMISs. This is because quantum key distribution employs the principles of quantum mechanics rather than computational complexity, to avoid various attacks such as the man-in-the-middle attacks, the replay attacks and the passive attacks. Meanwhile, classical cryptography can be used to achieve user authentication efficiently. Therefore, our protocol may be available with the rapid developments of extensive experiments for quantum key distribution.