Privacy-Preserving Range Query Quantum Scheme With Single Photons in Edge-Based Internet of Things

Range query in cloud-based outsourcing applications is an important data search service, but it can suffer from privacy disclosure. In this paper, we generalize and redefine privacy-preserving range query in edge-based Internet of Things (IoT). Furthermore, to enhance security and privacy of sensitive data, we introduce quantum cryptographic technologies and present a novel quantum approach to solve the problem. First, we present a feasible protocol for Quantum Secret Permutating (QSP) with single photons, which will be later utilized in the final scheme as a basic block. Second, we generalize traditional privacy-preserving range query to a secure one-sided two-party computation, i.e., specific dot product. Third, we present a synchronously grouping strategy based on Quantum Key Distribution (QKD) to reduce the complexity and improve the efficiency of solving this two-party computation, so that it can easily get the desired result by repeatedly using feasible quantum privacy query group by group. Finally, adopting our previously proposed quantum protocols, we design privacy-preserving range query quantum scheme in edge-based IoT. Compared with the classical related schemes, our proposed quantum scheme has higher security, because the security of our proposed protocols is based on the basic physical principles of quantum mechanics, instead of unproven computational difficulty assumptions.