Summary A primary important aspect of wireless network domain is known to be secured communication as the signals are emphatically available and broadcasted through the air. Quantum wireless networks are a hot topic of research in recent years that made researchers to avail new techniques in this field. Big data is one of the major aspects that support large‐scale quantum network applications. As sensor nodes have resource constraints, it is more complex when using the traditional techniques of key establishment that only used for stable communication networks. Group‐related applications are also one of the important aspects in wireless network for sending and receiving messages from multiple users. Unfortunately, maintenance of security for the group‐oriented protocols is major issue due to the frequent changes in membership. In this paper, a hybrid GKM with re‐keying procedure is proposed to obtain a secure communication for the remote system of unmanned autonomous vehicle (UAV) with mobile backbone network (MBN). Here, the group controller is selected based on the simplified hybrid energy efficient distributed (HEED) protocol and honey key encryption algorithm is used by the key management center (KMC) for generating and distribution of key for the group's controller. The secure communication is explored using the key exchange mechanism between the nodes. The joining and leaving of a node from the group are initiated by the re‐keying process. The simulation results explain the improved performance of the proposed hybrid method when compared with other existing techniques in terms of privacy level, energy, memory, and time consumption.
Summary A primary important aspect of wireless network domain is known to be secured communication as the signals are emphatically available and broadcasted through the air. Quantum wireless networks are a hot topic of research in recent years that made researchers to avail new techniques in this field. Big data is one of the major aspects that support large‐scale quantum network applications. As sensor nodes have resource constraints, it is more complex when using the traditional techniques of key establishment that only used for stable communication networks. Group‐related applications are also one of the important aspects in wireless network for sending and receiving messages from multiple users. Unfortunately, maintenance of security for the group‐oriented protocols is major issue due to the frequent changes in membership. In this paper, a hybrid GKM with re‐keying procedure is proposed to obtain a secure communication for the remote system of unmanned autonomous vehicle (UAV) with mobile backbone network (MBN). Here, the group controller is selected based on the simplified hybrid energy efficient distributed (HEED) protocol and honey key encryption algorithm is used by the key management center (KMC) for generating and distribution of key for the group's controller. The secure communication is explored using the key exchange mechanism between the nodes. The joining and leaving of a node from the group are initiated by the re‐keying process. The simulation results explain the improved performance of the proposed hybrid method when compared with other existing techniques in terms of privacy level, energy, memory, and time consumption.
Maritime communication systems face critical challenges in ensuring secure, reliable, and long-range connectivity due to inherent vulnerabilities in traditional encryption, coverage gaps in remote sea areas, and susceptibility to eavesdropping under complex maritime conditions. While Unmanned Aerial Vehicle (UAV)-assisted networks have expanded coverage, security remains a persistent concern. Quantum communication, leveraging quantum key distribution (QKD), offers a paradigm shift by ensuring information-theoretic security. This paper proposes a UAV-based quantum relay maritime communication system that integrates QKD, UAV relays, and satellite networks to establish a hybrid quantum-classical architecture. The innovation lies in deploying UAVs as dynamic relay nodes to enable BB84-protocol-based QKD, while satellites ensure global coverage. Key advancements include: (1) a unidirectional quantum channel design featuring UAV-mounted quantum emitters (Alice) and ship-based receivers (Bob), minimizing technical complexity while ensuring secure key distribution; (2) a multi-layered network integrating ship-UAV-ship, ship-UAV-base station, and ship-satellite communication modes, enhancing resilience against environmental interference; and (3) real-time quantum-classical synergy, where classical data channels (e.g., AES-encrypted) are dynamically secured by QKD-generated keys, achieving compatibility with existing infrastructure while eliminating key leakage risks. Simulations validate the system’s resilience under maritime conditions: optimizing parameters such as detection efficiency (eff > 90%) and dark count (dc < 10⁻⁶/pulse) achieves a stable secure key rate over 100 km, with a Quantum Bit Error Rate (QBER) below 0.5% at 200 km. The proposed architecture offers transformative applications in maritime safety, emergency response, and offshore operations, providing eavesdropping-resistant links for remote vessels and secure data exchange for critical infrastructure. By bridging the gap between quantum security and practical maritime deployment, this work establishes a scalable blueprint for next-generation communication systems in military, commercial, and environmental monitoring domains.
Ensuring secure data transmission in agrotechnical monitoring systems using unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs) is critical due to increasing cyber threats, particularly with the advent of quantum computing. This study proposes the integration of Quantum Key Distribution (QKD), based on the BB84 protocol, as a secure key management mechanism to enhance data security in UAV-based geographic information systems (GIS) for monitoring agricultural fields and forest fires. QKD is not an encryption algorithm but a secure key distribution protocol that provides information-theoretic security by leveraging the principles of quantum mechanics. Rather than replacing traditional encryption methods, QKD complements them by ensuring the secure generation and distribution of encryption keys, while AES-128 is employed for efficient data encryption. The QKD framework is optimized for real-time operations through adaptive key generation and energy-efficient hardware, alongside Lempel–Ziv–Welch (LZW) compression to improve the bandwidth efficiency. The simulation results demonstrate that the proposed system achieves secure key generation rates up to 50 Mbps with minimal computational overhead, maintaining reliability even under adverse environmental conditions. This hybrid approach significantly improves data resilience against both quantum and classical cyber-attacks, offering a comprehensive and robust solution for secure agrotechnical data transmission.
Unmanned Aerial Vehicles (UAVs) have gone from single platforms that were remotely piloted to fully networked, autonomous cyber-physical systems that operate in the civilian, industrial and defense arenas. Their increasing reliance on wireless communication for command and control, cooperative sensing, distributed decision-making and swarm coordination has raised the level of communication security to the point where it has become a mission-critical requirement. Contemporary UAV security architectures are much based on classical public-key–based cryptography (RSA and elliptic are the most well-known) whose security assumptions become fundamentally vulnerable against the presence of large-scale quantum computing. This chapter gives a comprehensive and future-oriented discussion about post-quantum cryptography (PQC)-based security models for UAVs communication and information exchange networks. Quantum resistance should be applied not only at the algorithmic level but across the whole UAV communications trust stack, which is the main argument. Part I set the conceptual and technical ground by affecting a short range of the improvement of UAV communication systems, in articulating a system quantum-era threat model and giving a motivation for mission-adaptive, cross-layer security architectures. The discussion makes the long-term confidentiality, survivability of the system and continuing operation more robust, and the security of UAV with PQC enabled is no longer speculative, but is considered a strategic requirement.
ABSTRACT Quantum communication represents a cutting‐edge research frontier, yet its wide‐area deployment remains constrained by infrastructure limitations. Unmanned aerial vehicle (UAV) technology, with its inherent flexibility and rapid deployability, offers a promising solution for dynamic quantum network expansion, giving rise to the emerging paradigm of UAV quantum networks. However, these networks face critical challenges, including energy and quantum resource constraints, as well as fragile quantum links. To address these issues, we propose an efficient clustering‐based communication scheme and develop an Energy‐Neighbor Weight Adaptive Clustering Algorithm (ENW‐ACA). This algorithm incorporates a multi‐index cluster head election strategy and a multi‐level routing mechanism to achieve low energy dissipation, high quantum resource utilization, and improved network throughput. Simulation results demonstrate that ENW‐ACA significantly outperforms traditional non‐clustering routing across multiple performance metrics, including energy efficiency, quantum resource utilization, and network throughput, while maintaining its advantages as the network scale expands. These findings provide theoretical support for clustering and routing design in UAV quantum networks and establish a technical foundation for their large‐scale deployment.
Unmanned Aerial Vehicles (UAVs) are increasingly integrated into Internet of Things (IoT) ecosystems for applications such as surveillance, disaster response, environmental monitoring, and logistics. These missions demand reliable and secure communication between UAVs and cloud platforms for command, control, and data storage. However, UAV communication channels are highly vulnerable to eavesdropping, spoofing, and man-in-the-middle attacks due to their wireless and often long-range nature. Traditional cryptographic schemes either impose excessive computational overhead on resource-constrained UAVs or lack sufficient robustness for cloud-level security. To address this challenge, we propose a dual-layer encryption architecture that balances lightweight efficiency with strong cryptographic guarantees. Unlike prior dual-layer approaches, the proposed framework introduces a context-aware adaptive lightweight layer for UAV-to-gateway communication and a hybrid post-quantum layer for gateway-to-cloud security, enabling dynamic cipher selection, energy-aware key scheduling, and quantum-resilient key establishment. In the first layer, UAV-to-gateway communication employs a lightweight symmetric encryption scheme optimized for low latency and minimal energy consumption. In the second layer, gateway-to-cloud communication uses post-quantum asymmetric encryption to ensure resilience against emerging quantum threats. The architecture is further reinforced with optional multi-path hardening and blockchain-assisted key lifecycle management to enhance scalability and tamper-proof auditability. Experimental evaluation using a UAV testbed and cloud integration shows that the proposed framework achieves 99.85% confidentiality preservation, reduces computational overhead on UAVs by 42%, and improves end-to-end latency by 35% compared to conventional single-layer encryption schemes. These results confirm that the proposed adaptive and hybridized dual-layer design provides a scalable, secure, and resource-aware solution for UAV-to-cloud communication, offering both present-day practicality and future-proof cryptographic resilience.
The emergence of sixth-generation (6G) wireless networks introduces unprecedented requirements for ultra-secure, low-latency communication across heterogeneous space–air–ground integrated network (SAGIN). Existing drone communication frameworks including LoRaWAN, Long Term Evolution, and Ad Hoc mesh architectures exhibit critical vulnerabilities to eavesdropping, jamming, and quantum-computational attacks due to their reliance on classical cryptographic primitives. To address these challenges, this work presents the Quantum-Secured Adaptive Routing Algorithm (QSARA), a novel framework designed for 6G-enabled unmanned aerial vehicle (UAV) networks that integrates Quantum Key Distribution (QKD), Reconfigurable Intelligent Surfaces (RIS), and Joint Communication and Sensing (JCAS) to enhance information-theoretic security and real-time performance. The proposed framework employs a quantum-augmented dynamic graph model to represent UAV swarm networking and uses Proximal Policy Optimisation (PPO)-based deep reinforcement learning to optimise routing under adversarial and uncertain conditions. A multi-objective cost function jointly captures classical quality of service metrics, such as latency, bandwidth, and energy consumption alongside with quantum-layer security indicators, including quantum bit error rate, key pool entropy, and key availability. High-fidelity simulations with 500 mobile drones under diverse adversarial threats demonstrate that the proposed framework achieves a key establishment success rate of 96.2%, end-to-end latency of 23.7 milliseconds, energy consumption of 7.8 watt-hours, and a packet delivery ratio of 94.1%, outperforming state-of-the-art classical and quantum-aware baselines. These results position the QSARA as a scalable and quantum-resilient routing solution for mission-critical UAV networking in next-generation 6G smart mobility ecosystems.