Caviar Parrot Optimizer: A Quantum Key Distribution Approach to Secure Authentication and Data Storage

ABSTRACT Cloud computing enables flexible data access and storage, but introduces serious security concerns due to its shared and open nature. Secure authentication is essential to prevent unauthorized access, data breaches, and identity theft. Traditional methods are increasingly ineffective, especially against evolving threats like quantum attacks. Hence, there is a growing need for robust, scalable, and quantum‐resilient authentication solutions to ensure data privacy and trust in cloud environments. Hence, this paper proposes a Caviar Parrot Optimizer (CaV‐PO) to generate the optimal secret key for secure authentication and data storage. The data is accessed by numerous entities, like the Client System, Authentication Server, Primary Healthcare Center (PHC), Aadhaar Server (ADS), and Citizen Health Information Management System (CHIMS). A multi‐phase secure authentication and data storage protocol, like Initialization and Registration, Authentication, Quantum Key agreement, Data encryption, and Data storage, is included in this research to ensure data privacy and secure communication between systems. Initially, the basic information of the user is registered, and then authentication is established to validate the user's identity. The optimal secret key is generated in the Quantum Key agreement phase, between entities using the developed CaV‐PO scheme to secure communication. Then, sensitive data is encrypted to ensure its confidentiality and prevent unauthorized access, and finally, data is stored securely in distributed storage systems. Experimental results indicate that CaV‐PO achieves a computation cost of 51.867 s, normalized variance of 0.860, and conditional privacy of 0.866, demonstrating its effectiveness in enhancing cloud security and privacy.