City Research Online

Abstract

Biometric authentication has become integral to digital identity systems, particularly in smart cities where it enables secure access to services across governance, transportation, and public infrastructure. Centralised architectures, though widely used, pose privacy and scalability challenges due to the aggregation of sensitive biometric data. Decentralised identity frameworks offer better data sovereignty and eliminate single points of failure but introduce new security concerns, particularly around mutual trust among distributed devices. In such environments, biometric sensors and verification agents must authenticate one another before sharing sensitive biometric data. Existing authentication schemes rely on classical public key infrastructure, which is increasingly susceptible to quantum attacks. This work addresses this gap by proposing a quantum-secure communication protocol for decentralised biometric systems, built upon an enhanced Quantum Key Distribution (QKD) system. The protocol incorporates quantum-resilient authentication at both the classical and quantum layers of QKD: post-quantum cryptography (PQC) is used to secure the classical channel, while authentication qubits verify the integrity of the quantum channel. Once trust is established, QKD generates symmetric keys for encrypting biometric data in transit. Qiskit-based simulations show a key generation rate of 15 bits/sec and 89% efficiency. This layered, quantum-resilient approach offers scalable, robust authentication for next-generation smart city infrastructures.

Publication Type:	Conference or Workshop Item (Paper)
Additional Information:	© 2026 The Authors. This accepted manuscript is made available under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License (CC-BY), which permits unrestricted use, distribution and reproduction in any medium, provided the original work is properly cited.
Publisher Keywords:	Protocols,Smart cities, Scalability Qubit, Quantum channels, Authentication, Transportation, Public key, Biometric authentication, Quantum key distribution
Subjects:	Q Science > QA Mathematics > QA75 Electronic computers. Computer science
Departments:	School of Science & Technology School of Science & Technology > Department of Computer Science School of Science & Technology > Department of Engineering
SWORD Depositor:	Symplectic Administrator

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