Quant-Meta: Quantum Key Distribution Framework for Telesurgery in Metaverse Environment

Advanced robotics, high-speed networking, and real-time haptics have opened a myriad of opportunities to extend telesurgery in Metaverse environments. The telesurgery metaverse (TMs) offers high-quality, immersive, and interactive surgical scenarios. Despite the remarkable progress, TMs suffer from operational threats against quantum-adversarial attacks, which can jeopardize the integrity, reliability, and safety of operated patients. The paper presents a novel framework Quant-Meta, that integrates quantum key distribution (QKD) in TM through the BB84 protocol. A framework is presented for TM, where the surgeon communicates via gestures that are communicated securely to the robotic arm present in a metaverse environment. A quantum channel sets up the BB84 key distribution, and the sender and receiver agree to the shared key. Once it is set up, the communication is supported by a 6G-envisioned tactile internet (TI) channel. which assures high reliability. To ensure high precision, explainable artificial intelligence (XAI) is integrated with the trained model to predict doctor gestures. The framework is analyzed in terms of BB84 protocol design, and quantum channel parameters. The result signifies a high probability of intruder detection and a 19.87 % improvement in channel transmission rate. The quantum bit error rate also likes below 4 %, with a high sifted key rate. The results indicate the potential viability of the framework in practical telesurgical deployments.