SPECIAL SECTION ON RECENT ADVANCES IN CLOUD RADIO ACCESS NETWORKS

Received December 17, 2017, accepted January 26, 2018, date of publication January 30, 2018, date of current version March 15, 2018.
Digital Object Identifier 10.1109/ACCESS.2018.2799879

Secure Quantum Steganography Protocol

for Fog Cloud Internet of Things
AHMED A. ABD EL-LATIF 1 , BASSEM ABD-EL-ATTY1 ,
M. SHAMIM HOSSAIN 2 , (Senior Member),
SAMIR ELMOUGY3 , AND AHMED GHONEIM 2 , (Member, IEEE)
1 Department of Mathematics and Computer Science, Faculty of Science, Menoufia University, Shebin El-Koom 32511, Egypt
2 Department of Software engineering, College of Computer and Information Sciences, King Saud University, Riyadh 11543, Saudi Arabia
3 Department of Computer Science, Faculty of Computers and Information, Mansoura University, Mansoura 35516, Egypt

Corresponding author: M. Shamim Hossain (mshossain@ksu.edu.sa)

This work was supported by the Deanship of Scientific Research by King Saud University through Research Group under Project RGP-229.

ABSTRACT The security of sensitive information is an urgent need in today’s communication, principally
in cloud and Internet of Things (IoT) environments. Therefore, a well-designed security mechanism should
be carefully considered. This paper presents a new framework for secure information in fog cloud IoT. In the
framework, the user in one location embeds his/her valuable data via the proposed quantum steganography
protocol and uploads the covered data to the fog cloud. The intended receiver in another location accesses
the data from the fog cloud and extracts the intended content via the proposed extraction approach. This
paper also presents a novel quantum steganography protocol based on hash function and quantum entangled
states. To the best of our knowledge, there is no prior quantum steganography protocol that authenticates an
embedded secret message. In the suggested protocol, the hash function is utilized to authenticate embedded
secret messages. The presented protocol is secure against well-known attacks, such as message, man-in-the-
middle, and no-message attacks. In addition, it does not consume additional channels besides the proposed
one to send a secret message or verify security. The proposed approach is nominated for use in fog and
mobile edge computing.

INDEX TERMS Quantum steganography, authentication, Internet of Things, fog computing, cloud
computing.

I. INTRODUCTION
The protection of sensitive data represents an urgent need for
secure communications, especially in today’s innovative and
modern information and communication technology, such as
in fog cloud Internet of Things (IoT) [1], [7], [8]. Fog cloud
IoT is a new paradigm and an incredible technology for equip-
ping quickly deployable and scalable information technology
solutions at conservative network bandwidth, reduced infras-
tructure costs, low latency, location awareness, and mobility
support. It is a trusted and dependable solution to bring the
services and resources of the cloud closer to users and thus
assists in leveraging the available services and resources in
the edge networks. However, fog cloud IoT services lead to
privacy and security issues and challenges [2]–[6], [9]. Trans-
mitting secret data through unsecured and open channels,
as in fog cloud IoT, is an issue that should be addressed.
One of the solutions for dealing with the security concerns,
especially the handling of secret data covertly in the Internet-
based computing paradigm, is via quantum information
processing (QIP).
QIP has received considerable attention from scientists
devoted to development and those interested in introducing
novel quantum approaches for processing, storing, and trans-
mitting quantum information. In recent years, some papers
have focused on several key topics of QIP, such as quan-
tum coding [10], quantum teleportation [11], [12], quantum
cryptography [13], [14], and quantum steganography, among
many others.
The aim of quantum steganography is to transfer
classical or quantum data covertly via open channels.
Quantum steganography can classified into four categories
according to the embedding methods used: quantum data

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A. A. Abd El-Latif et al.: Secure Quantum Steganography Protocol for Fog Cloud Internet of Things
TABLE 1. Comparison between the proposed protocol and some recently proposed protocols.
hiding (QDH) [15], [16], quantum error-correcting code
(QECC) [17], [18], quantum image steganography [19], [20],
and quantum steganography protocols [21]–[25].
This paper focuses on quantum steganography proto-
cols. In what follows, we shed light on the recently proposed
quantum steganography protocols. In [17], Gea-Banacloche
presented a quantum protocol to hide a secret message as an
error. In [18], Shaw et al. presented a quantum protocol that
uses noisy quantum channels but consumes an extra Bell state
for each transmitted four-bit secret message. On the basis
of the BB84 protocol [13], Martin [21] presented a quan-
tum protocol for steganography communications. In [22],
Liao et al. presented a multi-party quantum steganography
communication based on quantum secret sharing. In [23],
Qu et al. proposed a protocol to send four-bit classical secret
information with fewer keys required in each round than
that of the embedding qubits of [18]. Qu et al. [24] pre-
sented a quantum protocol based on χ-type entangled swap-
ping to send eight-bit classical secret information. Recently,
Xu et al. [25] presented a quantum scheme based on Bell
states to send four-bit secret information without any addi-
tional auxiliary quantum states.
The security of quantum communication is guaranteed by
the quantum no-cloning theorem and the quantum uncer-
tainty principle to prevent eavesdroppers from unconditional
attacks. The techniques of attack in quantum communication
are based only on the principles of quantum mechanics.
Authentication is considered necessary as a defense against
active attacks. Without the authentication step legitimate
users can be easily eavesdropped on and the secret message
revealed. In [26], Xin et al. presented a quantum authenti-
cation protocol with hash function, which uses four unitary
transformations to directly encode classical bits (message +
hash value) into a Bell state.
Suppose Alice needs to send a message to Bob. When
Bob receives the message, he does not know if it comes
from Alice or Eve. Consequently, Bob wants a technique
to authenticate the security of the transmitted message.
VOLUME 6, 2018
Quantum authentication is used to verify the security of the
transmitted message [27]. To the best of our knowledge,
most quantum authentication protocols are quantum cryptog-
raphy [26]–[35], quantum teleportation [36], and quantum
network [37] protocols, and no quantum hiding protocol
exists to authenticate embedded secret data. Therefore, it is
necessary to study quantum steganography protocols based
on authentication techniques to achieve high security for the
embedded secret messages.
Therefore, in this paper, a novel quantum steganography
framework for secure messages in fog cloud IoT is proposed.
The proposed approach is based on quantum entangled states,
exclusive OR operation (XOR) , gray code, and hash function.
Table 1 presents a simple comparison between some recent
protocols and the presented one. In the proposed protocol,
Alice computes the hash value of the secret message and
then obtains the gray code for executing the XOR operation
to the labels of initial states and the bit sequence as labels
of final states. Afterward, Alice transforms the initial states
into final states by applying two unitary operations on the
two first particles of the initial states. Bob can get the bit
sequence by executing the XOR operation to the decode
operation of the gray code for the final states and the initial
states. Bob can extract the encoded hash code and the secret
message from the bit sequence and then get the hash value
for the recovered message. By checking the hash value of
the encoded hash code and the recovered message, Bob can
ensure the security of the embedded secret information. Thus,
any measurement on the transmitted qubits will be recovered
by Bob.
The remainder of this work is organized as follows.
Section II discusses the framework of secure quantum
steganography for fog cloud IoT. Section III offers prelimi-
nary work for the proposed approach. Section IV presents
the proposed quantum steganography protocol. Section V
is devoted to the performance analysis, including capacity,
imperceptibility, and security analysis. Finally, Section VI
provides the concluding remarks.
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states. They are as follows:

ξ = √1 (|00i + |11i)
 +
2
1
ψ = √ (|01i + |10i)
 +
2
ξ = √1 (|00i − |11i)
 −
2
1
ψ = √ (|01i − |10i)
 −
(3)
2
When a unitary transformation is applied on the first parti-
cle of the Bell state, the particle transforms into another state.
The four unitary transformations, U0 , U1 , U2 , and U3 , can
be written as follows:
 
FIGURE 1. Proposed framework for secure quantum steganography in fog 1 0
cloud IoT. U0 = |0ih0| + |1ih1| = = σI
0 1
 
0 1
II. FRAMEWORK OF SECURE QUANTUM U1 = |0ih1| + |1ih0| = = σX
STEGANOGRAPHY FOR FOG CLOUD IoT 1 0
 
Figure 1 shows the framework of the proposed secure quan- 1 0
U2 = |0ih0| − |1ih1| = = σZ
tum steganography in the scenario of fog and mobile edge 0 −1
computing. The user in one location embeds important and
 
0 1
sensitive information via the proposed quantum steganogra- U3 = |0ih1| − |1ih0| = = σZ σX = iσY (4)
−1 0
phy scheme and sends the covered secret information to the
fog cloud. The staff in another location accesses the data Assume that Bob and Alice share a Bell state. Alice can
from the fog cloud and recovers the content via the proposed transform the state into one of the four states as in Table 3.
extraction approach. The proposed quantum steganography In practice, Alice applies into her particle one of the unitary
system ensures the authentication and security for fog cloud transformations to get one of the four Bell states.
IoT users.
TABLE 3. Bell states and the corresponding unitary transformations.
III. PRELIMINARY WORK
A. GRAY CODE
Gray code is a signal coding method commonly used in
digital conversions. It is defined as follows:
gi = bi ⊕ bi+1 , (1)
where i = 0, 1, . . . , q − 1, and b = (bq bq−1 . . . b1 b0 ) Suppose Alice has two particles A1 and A2 that are maxi-
mally entangled with two particles B1 and B2 , respectively,
gq = bq (2) in Bob’s side. There are 16 states of tensor products of any
two Bell states as in S:
A simple example of gray code is shown in Table 2.
S = {|ξ + i⊗|ξ + i, |ξ − i⊗|ξ − i, |ψ + i⊗|ψ + i, |ψ − i⊗|ψ − i,
TABLE 2. Simple example of a gray code. |ξ + i⊗|ξ − i, |ξ − i⊗|ξ + i, |ψ + i⊗|ψ − i, |ψ − i⊗|ψ + i,
|ξ + i⊗|ψ + i, |ξ − i⊗|ψ − i, |ψ + i⊗|ξ + i, |ψ − i⊗|ξ − i,
|ξ + i⊗|ψ − i, |ξ − i⊗|ψ + i, |ψ + i⊗|ξ − i, |ψ − i⊗|ξ + i}

Set S consists of 16 elements, labeled as 0000, 0001, . . . ,

1111, respectively. When applying two unitary transforma-
tions on the first particle of any initial state, the result must
be an element in set S as a final state.

IV. PROPOSED QUANTUM STEGANOGRAPHY PROTOCOL

B. UNITARY TRANSFORMATIONS AND BELL STATES Any quantum steganography protocol consists of three
John Bell proved that, for a two-qubit quantum system, there parts [38], namely, sharing key, embedding procedure, and
are only four possible entangled states, which are called Bell extracting procedure, as seen in Figure 2.

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A. A. Abd El-Latif et al.: Secure Quantum Steganography Protocol for Fog Cloud Internet of Things
FIGURE 2. Framework of a general quantum steganography protocol [38].
A. INITIAL PREPARATION AND SHARING KEYS
First, Alice and Bob negotiate the initial state Si0 , iterative
key K, and id for the used hash function hid by utilizing
any secure quantum channel, such as quantum secure direct
communication (QSDC) schemes [39]–[42].
1) K ∈ {−15, −14, . . . , 14, 15} is used to iterate the
initial state in the process of sending the message
according to the following equation.:
j+1 j
S0 = Si⊕k
i B. PROPOSED QUANTUM STEGANOGRAPHY PROTOCOL
where ⊕ means the modulo-16 addition operation,
j = 0, 1, 2,. . . , N (N is the number of agreeing posi-
tions), and i is the label of initial state i = 0, 1, 2,. . . ,15.
For example, if the first initial state is S50 and K is 7,
then the next initial state is S5⊕70 = S121 and the next
1 2
one is S12⊕7 = S3 and so on.
2) The id is a type of hash function, namely, hid .
Table 4 [43] shows the list of hash functions used in
the proposed protocol.
TABLE 4. Simple examples of hash functions [43].
After negotiating the initial states and hash function, Alice
chooses the positions of Bell states to embed the secret mes-
sage, as shown in Figure 3 and illustrated in the following
steps:
1) Alice owns a sequence of entangled states of |9 + iAB
Bell state, and then sends each B particle to Bob
through a quantum channel, while keeping A particle
for herself.
2) After Bob gets the particles of sequence B, Alice can
randomly apply unitary transformation U2 to her par-
ticles to transfer the Bell state |9 + iAB to Bell state
|9 − iAB . Next, she can apply three other unitary trans-
formations U0 , U1 ,and U3 to the remainder particles
and then transmit the sequence to Bob.
VOLUME 6, 2018
FIGURE 3. Selected positions of the embedded secret message.
3) Using measurements of the Bell states, Bob simply
gets the positions of Bell state |9 − i that will be
used to embed the secret message, while other posi-
tions, (|ξ + i, |ξ − i, and |9 + i), are used for the cover
message.
(5)
1) EMBEDDING PROCEDURE
Quantum steganography is used to embed or hide a classical/
quantum information under the cover of a normal quantum
channel. In this section, we will explain how to embed a
classical message under the cover of a quantum channel.
In the proposed protocol, the embedding technique is based
on the hidden rule between the Bell states and the unitary
transformations. To embed the secret message, we use four
sequences of particles of maximally entangled states labeled
as A1 , A2 , B1 , and B2 . The sequences of particles A1 and A2
belong to Alice, and the other two sequences belong to Bob.
The particles in sequences A1 and A2 are in the maximally
entangled state with the particles in sequences B1 and B2 ,
respectively. The embedding and extracting procedures of the
suggested protocol are given in Figure 4.
The embedding procedures are described as follows:
1) Alice and Bob share four sequences of particles, which
are maximally entangled states labeled as A1 , A2 , B1 ,
and B2 . The sequences A1 and A2 belong to Alice, and
the other two sequences belong to Bob. The Bell states
of two entangled sequences in the agreeing positions
are in the specific initial states according to the first
initial state Si0 and K.
2) Alice computes the hash value for the secret message
hid (secret message) = bn+1 bn+2 . . . bn+m , and then
converts the secret message to bit string b =
b1 b2 . . . bi . . . bn , where bi is a one-bit message bi ∈
{0, 1} for i = 1, 2, . . . , n + m.
3) Alice applies the XOR operation to the bit sequence
SB = b1 b2 . . . bi . . . bn bn+1 bn+2 . . . bn+m and the
j j+1
labels of initial states (Si0 , Si1 . . . Si , Si . . . SiN −1 , SiN )
and gets the gray code for the result as labels of final
j j+1
states (Sf0 , Sf1 . . . Sf , Sf . . . SfN −1 , SfN ). In other words,
labels of Sf = gray code (XOR (SB, labels of Si )). Note
that i and f are in {0000, 0001, . . . , 1111}.
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 A. A. Abd El-Latif et al.: Secure Quantum Steganography Protocol for Fog Cloud Internet of Things

j j+1
labels of initial states Si0 , Si1 , . . . , Si , Si , . . . , SiN −1 ,
SiN , which comes from the negotiated first initial
0 0
state Si0 and key K to get the bit sequence SB = b1
0 0 0 0 0
b2 . . . bi . . . bn bn+1 . . . bn+m .
0 0
3) Bob simply gets the hash code bn+1 . . . bn+m from the
0
bit sequence SB .
0 0 0
4) Bob converts the bit string b = b1 . . . bn to a message
string and computes the hash value for the recovered
message.
5) By checking the hash code obtained from the bit
sequence and the hash value obtained from the recov-
ered message, Bob can validate the embedded secret
message. Any measurement or forgery on the trans-
ferred qubits will be detected by Bob. Thus, Bob will
either accept the secret information or reject it.

FIGURE 4. Procedures of the proposed protocol.

4) Alice gets the gray code for executing the XOR opera-
tion to the bit sequence SB = b1 b2 . . . bi . . . bn bn+1
bn+2 . . . bn+m and the labels of initial states (Si0 ,
j j+1
Si1 . . . Si , Si . . . SiN −1 , SiN ) as labels of final states
j j+1
(Sf0 , Sf1 . . . Sf , Sf . . . SfN −1 , SfN ). In other words,
labels of Sf = gray code (XOR (SB, labels of Si )). Note
that i and f are in {0000, 0001, . . . , 1111}.
5) Alice applies two unitary transformations to each of
her own particles in the agreeing positions to trans-
j j+1
fer the initial states Si0 , Si1 , . . . , Si , Si , . . . , SiN −1 , SiN
j j+1
into final states Sf , Sf , . . . , Sf , Sf , . . . , SfN −1 , SfN
0 1

according to Table 3. She also applies two unitary

transformations to each of her own remainder particles
according to the cover message and then sends the
0 0
results of the particles (sequences A1 , A2 ) to Bob.
2) EXTRACTING PROCEDURE
The extracting procedures are described as follows:
1) Using quantum measurement, Bob simply gets the
labels of the final states in the agreeing positions of
j j+1
secret message Sf0 , Sf1 , . . . , Sf , Sf , . . . ,SfN −1 , SfN ,
as well as the unitary transformations Alice applied on
her particles of remainder positions, to obtain the cover
message.
2) Bob executes the XOR operation to the result of the
decode operation of the gray code for the labels of
j j+1
final states Sf0 , Sf1 , . . . , Sf , Sf , . . . , SfN −1 , SfN and the
FIGURE 5. Illustrated example of the proposed protocol.
C. ILLUSTRATED EXAMPLE FOR THE
PROPOSED PROTOCOL
Let us now illustrate a simple example for the proposed proto-
col (see Figure 5 ) and explain the three parts of the quantum
steganography system, namely, sharing keys, embedding pro-
cedure, and extracting procedure to send the secret message.
The secret message, for example, says ‘‘QM.’’
1) SHARING KEYS
Suppose that the negotiated initial state is S0101 , K is 0, and
the id hashing is 1 (the SDBM hash function returns integers
in the range of 0-255 and converts the value to binary form
eight-bit). According to the value of K and the initial

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A. A. Abd El-Latif et al.: Secure Quantum Steganography Protocol for Fog Cloud Internet of Things
state S0101 , Alice can get the initial states S0101 S0101 S0101
S0101 S0101 S0101 according to Eq. (5). Then, Bob and Alice
can share the positions of embedding the secret message.
Now, Alice needs to transmit the string ‘‘QM’’ to Bob.
2) EMBEDDING PROCEDURE
The hash value of the secret message ‘‘QM’’ is 1010 0001 and
the bit string of the secret message and hash value (bit string +
hash value) is 0101 0001 0100 1101 1010 0001. The result
of executing the XOR operation for the bit sequence and the
labels of initial states S0101 S0101 S0101 S0101 S0101 S0101 0101
0101 0101 0101 0101 0101 is 0000 0100 0001 1000 1111
0100, and the result of the gray code is 0000 0110 0001
0100 1000 1110 as labels of final states [S0000 S0110 S0001
S0100 S1000 S1110 ]. According to Table 3, Alice performs the
following unitary transformations [U2 U0 , U3 U3 , U0 U2 , U2
U2 , U2 U1 , U3 U2 ] into the sequences of her pair particles in
the agreeing positions to get the final states [S0000 S0110 S0001
S0100 S1000 S1110 ], respectively, and sends the sequences of
particles to Bob.
3) EXTRACTING PROCEDURE
Utilizing quantum measurements of particles in the agreeing
positions, Bob simply obtains the final states [S0000 S0110
S0001 S0100 S1000 S1110 ] and the cover message from the
remaining positions. The labels of the final states are 0000
0110 0001 0100 1000 1110, respectively. The decode oper-
ation of gray code for the labels of final states is 0000 0100
0001 1000 1111 0100. By executing the XOR operation to the
result of the decode operation of gray code and the labels of
initial states S0101 S0101 S0101 S0101 S0101 S0101 as 0101 0101
0101 0101 0101 0101, Bob obtains the bit sequence 0101
0001 0100 1101 1010 0001. The hash code is 10100001 from
the bit sequence, and the recovered message for 0101 0001
0100 1101 is ‘‘QM.’’ By checking the hash code obtained
from the bit sequence 10100001 and the hash value for the
recovered message 10100001, Bob accepts the recovered
message.
V. PERFORMANCE ANALYSES
A. CAPACITY
The embedding capacity for quantum steganography proto-
cols is the number of embedded qubits (bits) in a single qubit.
The maximum embedding capacity of the quantum steganog-
raphy protocols in [15], [17], [21], and [22] is one bit (qubit)
by transferring one qubit. In [23], the actual capacity is two
bits by consuming one Bell state and transferring one qubit.
In [24], [25], the actual capacity is four bit by transferring
two qubits and consuming two Bell states. The capacity for
the proposed protocol is four bits per two Bell states.
If the number of shared particles between the two partic-
ipants is large, then the number of embedded bits increases
depending on the increase in the number of agreeing posi-
tions. The embedding efficiency of the quantum steganogra-
phy protocol is given by the number of embedded secret bits
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over the number of transferred qubits. From this point of view,
the embedding efficiency can be increased by increasing the
selected embedding positions. By utilizing the hash function
in the authentication process, Bob will be able to detect any
measurement or forgery on the transferred particles. Thus,
Alice can select a large number of embedding positions.
Furthermore, we can conclude that the proposed protocol
has good capacity compared with other competing quantum
steganography protocols.
B. IMPERCEPTIBILITY ANALYSIS
Imperceptibility analysis is conducted to ensure the embed-
ded secret message is hardly detected and prevent dam-
age from eavesdroppers. Quantum steganography protocols
have imperceptibility advantages derived from the quantum
no-cloning theorem and the quantum uncertainty princi-
ple compared with traditional steganography protocols. The
imperceptibility of the proposed protocol lies completely on
the initial states and the selected positions of the embedded
secret message. Let Eve be an eavesdropper who fails to get
the final states only by measuring the transferred qubits in
the two sequences A1 and A2 because all particles are in
a maximum entangled state and the four qubits cannot be
accessed by Eve simultaneously. No leakage data occur in the
final states, so the imperceptibility of the suggested protocol
can be ensured.
C. SECURITY ANALYSIS
Security analysis is a critical assessment standard for any
quantum protocol. The main aim of security analysis is
to prevent the secret information from being eavesdropped
on or being attacked. The security of the suggested quantum
steganography protocol is not only ensured by the quantum
no-cloning theorem and the quantum uncertainty principle to
prevent the unconditional attack of eavesdroppers, but also in
the initial states, gray code, the used hash function, and the
selected positions of particles carrying the secret message.
Herein, we explain the security analysis in detail.
1) MAN-IN-THE-MIDDLE ATTACK
Eve plays the role of Alice (Bob) to communicate with
Bob (Alice) and extract the embedded information. Eve can-
not know the initial states Si , selected positions, or selected
hash function hid to send a fake sequence of entangled par-
ticles prepared by herself to send to Bob. First, Alice and
Bob negotiate the first initial state Si0 , iterative key K, and
id hid utilizing any secure QSDC scheme, and then Alice
chooses the positions of the Bell states to carry the secret
message. From this point of view, the initial states are pre-
pared according to Si0 and K, which are negotiated by any
secure QSDC scheme. This section shows how the proposed
protocol defends versus a man-in-the-middle attack. Hence,
we discuss the following possible cases.
Case 1: has no knowledge of the selected positions and the
keys transmitted by the QSDC scheme, and so she cannot get
any thing about the embedded secret data. Thus, Eve fails to
attack the proposed protocol.
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 A. A. Abd El-Latif et al.: Secure Quantum Steganography Protocol for Fog Cloud Internet of Things
Case 2: Eve succeeds in guessing the selected positions
of Bell states that carry the secret message. Eve does not get
any useful information about the initial states of the selected
positions. It turns out that one initial state has 16 possibilities.
Owing to the key K, the total initial states have 2N possibili-
ties, where N is the total number of embedded bits. Then, Eve
can predict the initial state with probability p = 21N . To prove
this, consider the following examples:
1) Assume that Alice needs to embeds the string ‘‘Q’’ that
has a binary equivalent of 10100001. Two initial states
are required to transmit this secret message. Given the
change of initial states, Eve can predict one initial state
with probability p = 214 = 16 1
. Therefore, the proba-
bility of predicting the initial states is p = 161
× 16 1
= After receiving all particles of the two sequences A1 and A2 ,
1
= 1
. Bob extracts the message from a bit string and its embedding
256 2 8
2) Assume that Alice needs to embeds the string ‘‘QM’’
that has a binary equivalent of 01010001 01001101.
Four initial states are required to transmit this secret
message. Thus, Eve can predict the initial states with
probability p = 16 1
× 161
× 161
× 16 1 1
= 654336 = 2116 .
Therefore, it is very difficult for Eve to guess the initial
states for the positions of the Bell states carrying the secret
message. Eve has no knowledge about about the embedded
secret message and the attack fails [she cannot communicate
with Alice (Bob) as Bob (Alice)]. In addition, Bob will reveal
the presence of Eve and abort the communication by using the
hash function. Hence, the suggested scheme is secure against
a man-in-the-middle attack.
2) MESSAGE ATTACK
Eve can only access the qubit transferred from Alice to Bob
for each Bell state. Eve can get nothing about the secret
information because she does not have the initial states and
the selected positions of states carrying the secret message.
If Eve performs any unitary transformation to any particle
in the selected positions, Bob deduces the attack when he
executes the hash function. Hence, the proposed scheme is
secure against a message attack.
3) MEASUREMENT ATTACK
Eve aims to obtain any thing about the secret information
from the two sequences A1 and A2 that Alice sends to Bob.
However, Eve cannot deduce the final states by measuring
the transferred qubits because all qubits are in a maximum
entangled state and Eve is unable to access the four qubits
jointly. Thus, Eve has no information about the secret mes-
sage. Any measurement on any particle in the two sequences
A1 and A2 performed by Eve leads to corresponding changes
of particles in the two sequences B1 and B2 because of the
entanglement property of Bell states. This condition leads to
changes in the final states and in the extracted bit sequence
0 0 0 0 0 0
SB = b1 b2 . . . bn bn+1 . . . bn+m (secret message + hash
code). By checking the hash code obtained from the bit
0 0
sequence bn+1 . . . bn+m and the obtained hash value from the
recovered message, Bob can detect any measurement on the
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transmitted particles. Eve likewise has no information about
the initial states and the selected positions of qubits carrying
the secret message. Therefore, the measurement attack has no
effect on this quantum steganography protocol.
4) NO-MESSAGE ATTACK
Eve generates a sequence of particles and transmits it to Bob.
Her main goal is to make Bob believe that the classical bits
embedded in this sequence comes from Alice. Eve does not
have the initial states, hash function, or the selected positions
of states carrying the secret message in order to send two fake
sequences of particles. When Bob receives these particles, he
cannot determine if it comes from Alice or an eavesdropper.
hash value from the labels of the final states in the selected
positions. In addition, he deduces the attack by checking the
hash code obtained from the bit sequence with the hash value
obtained from the recovered message. Thus, the suggested
protocol is secure against a no-message attack.
VI. CONCLUSION
This paper proposes a new framework for secure quan-
tum steganography in fog cloud IoT. A new secure quan-
tum steganography protocol based on quantum entangled
states, XOR operation, gray code, and hash function is also
proposed. The suggested protocol does not use any extra
quantum communications and/or quantum states besides the
proposed protocol to transmit the secret message or ver-
ify it. The hash function is used to confirm the security of
the proposed protocol. The performance and security analy-
ses demonstrate that the suggested quantum steganography
scheme is secure against most well-known attacks.
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AHMED A. ABD EL-LATIF received the B.Sc.
degree with (Hons.) in mathematics and computer
science and the M.Sc. degree in computer science
from Menoufia University, Egypt, in 2005 and
2010, respectively, and the Ph.D. degree in com-
puter science & technology from the Harbin
Institute of Technology, Harbin, China, in 2013.
He is currently a Lecturer in computer science
with Menoufia University. He has authored and
co-authored of many publications, including ref-
ereed IEEE/ACM/Springer/Elsevier journals, conference papers, and book
chapters. His areas of interests are multimedia content encryption, secure
wireless communication, IoT, applied cryptanalysis, perceptual cryptogra-
phy, secret media sharing, information hiding, biometrics, forensic analysis
in digital images, and quantum information processing. He is a Referee of
many referred international repute journals and conferences. He received
many awards, State Encouragement Award in Engineering Sciences 2016,
Arab Republic of Egypt, the Best Ph.D. Student Award from the Harbin
Institute of Technology, 2013; Young Scientific Award, Menoufia University,
2014. He is a fellow at Academy of Scientific Research and Technology,
Egypt.
BASSEM ABD-EL-ATTY was born in Menoufia,
Egypt, in 1989. He received the B.S. degree in
physics and computer science, and the M.Sc.
degree in computer science from Menoufia Uni-
versity, Egypt, in 2010 and 2017, respectively,
where he is currently pursuing the Ph.D. degree in
quantum information processing with the School
of Mathematics and Computer Science, Faculty of
Science. His research interests include quantum
information processing and image processing.
10339
 A. A. Abd El-Latif et al.: Secure Quantum Steganography Protocol for Fog Cloud Internet of Things
M. SHAMIM HOSSAIN (SM’09) received the Ph.D. degree in electrical and
computer engineering from the University of Ottawa, Canada. He is currently
a Professor of software engineering with King Saud University, Riyadh,
Saudi Arabia. His research interests include serious games, social media, IoT,
cloud and multimedia for healthcare, smart health, and resource provisioning
for big data processing on media clouds. He has authored and co-authored
around 165 publications including refereed IEEE/ACM/Springer/Elsevier
journals, conference papers, books, and book chapters. He has served as a
member of the organizing and technical committees of several international
conferences and workshops. He has served as the co-Chair, the General
Chair, the Workshop Chair, the Publication Chair, and the TPC for over
12 IEEE and ACM conferences and workshops. He currently serves as the
Co-Chair of the 1st IEEE ICME workshop on Multimedia Services and
Tools for Smart-health MUST-SH 2018. He was a recipient of a number
of awards including, the Best Conference Paper Award, the 2016 ACM
Transactions on Multimedia Computing, Communications and Applica-
tions (TOMM) Nicolas D. Georganas Best Paper Award, and the Research
in Excellence Award from King Saud University. He is on the Editorial
Boards of the IEEE Access, the IEEE Multimedia, Computers and Elec-
trical Engineering (Elsevier), Games for Health Journal and International
Journal of Multimedia Tools and Applications (Springer). He served as
the Guest Editor of the IEEE TRANSACTIONS ON INFORMATION TECHNOLOGY IN
BIOMEDICINE, International Journal of Multimedia Tools and Applications
(Springer), Cluster Computing (Springer), Future Generation Computer
Systems (Elsevier), Computers and Electrical Engineering (Elsevier), and
International Journal of Distributed Sensor Networks. He currently serves
as a Lead Guest Editor of the IEEE Communication Magazine, IEEE
Transactions on Cloud Computing, the IEEE ACCESS, Future Generation
Computer Systems (Elsevier), and Sensors (MDPI). He is a member of ACM
and ACM SIGMM.
10340
SAMIR ELMOUGY received the Ph.D. degree in
computer science from the School of Electrical
Engineering and Computer Science, Oregon State
University, USA. From 2008 to 2014, he was an
Assistant Professor at the Department of Com-
puter Science, College of Computer and Infor-
mation Sciences, King Saud University, Riyadh,
Saudi Arabia. Since 2014, he has been the Chair
of Computer Science Department, Faculty of
Computers and Information, Mansoura University,
Egypt. He has published over 50 publications including the refereed IEEE
Transactions/Springer Journals, the IEEE conferences, and book chapters.
His current research interests include error correcting codes, computer
networks, IoT, analysis of algorithms, machine learning, and software
engineering.
AHMED GHONEIM (M’10) received the M.Sc.
degree in software modeling from the Univer-
sity of Menoufia, Egypt, and the Ph.D. degree
in software engineering from the University of
Magdeburg, Germany, in 1999 and 2007, respec-
tively. He is currently an Assistant Professor
with the Department of Software Engineering,
College of Computer Science and Information Sci-
ences, king Saud University. His research activ-
ities address software evolution, service oriented
engineering, software development methodologies, quality of services, net-
centric computing, and human computer interaction.
VOLUME 6, 2018