Quantum Secure Biometric Authentication in Decentralised Systems

• URL: http://arxiv.org/abs/2601.04852v1
• Date: Thu, 08 Jan 2026 11:42:18 GMT
• Title: Quantum Secure Biometric Authentication in Decentralised Systems
• Authors: Tooba Qasim, Vasilios A. Siris, Izak Oosthuizen, Muttukrishnan Rajarajan, Sujit Biswas,
• Abstract summary: Centralised archi-tectures pose privacy and scalabil-ity challenges due to the aggregation of sensitive data.<n>This work proposes a quantum-secure communication protocol for decen-tralised biometric systems.
• Score: 0.9347066036125967
• License: http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/
• Abstract: Biometric authentication has become integral to digital identity systems, particularly in smart cities where it en-ables secure access to services across governance, trans-portation, and public infrastructure. Centralised archi-tectures, though widely used, pose privacy and scalabil-ity challenges due to the aggregation of sensitive biomet-ric data. Decentralised identity frameworks offer better data sovereignty and eliminate single points of failure but introduce new security concerns, particularly around mu-tual trust among distributed devices. In such environments, biometric sensors and verification agents must authenticate one another before sharing sensitive biometric data. Ex-isting authentication schemes rely on classical public key infrastructure, which is increasingly susceptible to quan-tum attacks. This work addresses this gap by propos-ing a quantum-secure communication protocol for decen-tralised biometric systems, built upon an enhanced Quan-tum Key Distribution (QKD) system. The protocol incorpo-rates quantum-resilient authentication at both the classical and quantum layers of QKD: post-quantum cryptography (PQC) is used to secure the classical channel, while authen-tication qubits verify the integrity of the quantum channel. Once trust is established, QKD generates symmetric keys for encrypting biometric data in transit. Qiskit-based sim-ulations 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.

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