QBaN: Quantum Bacterial Nanonetworks for Secure Molecular Communication

Bacterial networks-based novel healthcare applications integrated with the Internet of Bio-Nano Things (IoBNT) have been on the rise, particularly due to their high efficacy in delivering drugs at targeted sites. Nevertheless, these networks are vulnerable to various cyber security risks such as unauthorized access, data tampering, and malicious attacks from internal and external intruders. By leveraging the property of quantum entanglement, we propose a security protocol, QBaN, to detect and thwart security breaches posed by intruders and securely send the information to the intended receiver. We use the von Neumann entropy metric to detect changes in the entangled quantum states. We evaluate the QBaN’s capability of detecting eavesdropping events by varying threshold values. Simulation results demonstrate the protocol’s efficacy in intrusion detection with an AUC of 0.78 on the ROC curve. The energy consumption for quantum entanglement is approximately 66.82% and 98.86% less than that for the bacterial propagation and DNA replication, respectively.