Nurul Nazihah Ismail MSc Dissertation 2015/16

An Investigation on Quantum Cryptography

Supervised by M.Stannett

Abstract

The demand of electronic communications keeps increasing throughout the world. As the growth of hackers population also becomes bigger, it makes secrecy becomes very important. So it is crucial to have some approaches to make information or message opaque except to legitimate parties. So cryptography needs to be applied in this kind of situation. Complex mathematics technique is used in implementing traditional cryptography to secure the data while quan tum key distribution (QKD) is the best example of quantum cryptography. It relies on quantum mechanics which offers the information to be theoretically more secured compared to traditional cryptography. This study has two main objectives which are first, to implement a protocol called BB84 QKD in Java language using Eclipse IDE as the software compiler. Secondly is to educate people about especially Computer Science students about quantum cryptography. BB84 QKD Protocol is implemented in order to show the process of generating a random shared key between two parties. It will consider the presence of an eavesdropper over the commu nication  line too. Since this protocol involves quantum mechanics like photons and quantum channels which are quite challenging, Prototype Model is chosen to be the best methodology so that any repetition phase in this model can be done. After the implementation phase is done, testing is conducted to ensure that the software application works as it should. In the nutshell, it has been proved that a secure random shared key can be obtained after simulating this protocol. The key then can be used with other encryption algorithms to encrypt data.