Power-system operations generate large volumes of sensitive operational data - including real-time telemetry, protection control signals, metering and settlement records, and maintenance logs - which are subject to strict confidentiality, integrity, and availability requirements. Highly sensitive data must be retained long term for regulatory compliance and dispute forensics, imposing elevated requirements on cryptographic strength, key management, and auditability. This paper presents an end-to-end, quantum-key-based data protection framework tailored for power-grid operations. The design leverages QKD as a high-entropy root key source and integrates a lifecycleaware Key Management System (KMS), controlled offline key injection with tamper-resistant secure media, hardware-backed cryptographic modules at terminals and gateways, a rule-driven field-level encryption engine with triggerable re-encryption, and an immutable audit chain for verifiable logging. The architecture enforces strong authentication, integrity verification, and comprehensive auditability across the full key and data lifecy-cle-generation, injection, loading, use, backup, re-encryption and destruction-while enabling transparent gateway-mediated access for legacy applications. Practical deployment trade-offs, alternatives (TEE/MPC, PQC hybrids), and anchoring strategies for long-term forensic evidence are discussed, yielding a modular, scalable, and quantum-resistant solution for protecting highsensitivity power-system data.
Power-system operations generate large volumes of sensitive operational data - including real-time telemetry, protection control signals, metering and settlement records, and maintenance logs - which are subject to strict confidentiality, integrity, and availability requirements. Highly sensitive data must be retained long term for regulatory compliance and dispute forensics, imposing elevated requirements on cryptographic strength, key management, and auditability. This paper presents an end-to-end, quantum-key-based data protection framework tailored for power-grid operations. The design leverages QKD as a high-entropy root key source and integrates a lifecycleaware Key Management System (KMS), controlled offline key injection with tamper-resistant secure media, hardware-backed cryptographic modules at terminals and gateways, a rule-driven field-level encryption engine with triggerable re-encryption, and an immutable audit chain for verifiable logging. The architecture enforces strong authentication, integrity verification, and comprehensive auditability across the full key and data lifecy-cle-generation, injection, loading, use, backup, re-encryption and destruction-while enabling transparent gateway-mediated access for legacy applications. Practical deployment trade-offs, alternatives (TEE/MPC, PQC hybrids), and anchoring strategies for long-term forensic evidence are discussed, yielding a modular, scalable, and quantum-resistant solution for protecting highsensitivity power-system data.
The energy and power industry faces increasing data security challenges amidst its digital transformation. Databases, as the foundation of digital infrastructure, require advanced encryption techniques to safeguard sensitive information. This paper proposes a novel encryption framework, QKD-ABE, that integrates Quantum Key Distribution (QKD) with Attribute-Based Encryption (ABE) to enhance the confidentiality, integrity, and access control of power system data. QKD enables unconditional security in key distribution by leveraging quantum mechanics, effectively preventing key interception and tampering. ABE provides fine-grained access control by enforcing encryption policies based on user attributes, ensuring that only authorized individuals can access private data. The proposed scheme also demonstrates strong resistance to common security threats, including man-in-the-middle and eavesdropping attacks, through quantum measurement disturbance and Quantum Bit Error Rate (QBerr) verification. Experimental results and theoretical analysis indicate that QKD-ABE offers a secure, efficient, and scalable solution for protecting sensitive data in modern smart grid environments.
Quantum computing is rapidly approaching a stage where classical cryptographic systems, particularly RSA, ECC, and Diffie–Hellman, will no longer provide adequate security for critical infrastructure. The emergence of Shor’s and Grover’s algorithms introduces unprecedented vulnerability to national cyber-defense ecosystems, underpinning power grids, transportation, military communications, and banking systems. This paper presents a unified post-quantum cryptographic (PQC) security framework integrating lattice-based primitives, hybrid key-exchange mechanisms, and secure orchestration for resource-constrained operational-technology environments. The proposed architecture leverages NIST-recommended schemes, including CRYSTALS-Kyber, CRYSTALS-Dilithium, and SPHINCS+, to ensure long-term confidentiality, integrity, and interoperability across legacy and modern control environments. A defense-in-depth trust-fabric is introduced to protect critical data flows across edge controllers, automation PLCs, substations, cloud-SCADA gateways, and defense communication systems. Performance evaluation demonstrates a 39.4% reduction in key-exchange latency, 46% faster authentication cycles, and zero-downtime cryptographic transition capability. Our findings position this framework as a practical migration blueprint supporting national PQC readiness and cyber-resilience mandates.
Hospitals increasingly store highly sensitive clinical data outside the primary facility, including medical imaging archives, long-term backups, clinical documents, and inter-site replicated data. While essential for care delivery, resilience, and collaboration, these off-site workflows expose data to long-term confidentiality risks such as harvest-now-decrypt-later attacks, insider threats at external providers, and future cryptographic degradation—under strict requirements for availability and minimal operational disruption. This paper presents a practical hybrid security architecture that combines post-quantum cryptography (PQC) and quantum key distribution (QKD) to protect off-site hospital data. PQC provides an always-available baseline for secure key delivery across all workflows and coordination between distributed security components, while QKD, when available, supplies additional high-entropy key material through a centralized Key Management System (KMS). Importantly, QKD is treated as an optional enhancement rather than a dependency: when QKD is unavailable, all services continue uninterrupted using PQC-based protection. The architecture is applied to three representative workflows: off-site PACS imaging storage, FHIR-based off-site health record storage, and secure inter-site data transfers.
Cloud-native application ecosystems increasingly rely on large-scale microservices architectures composed of ephemeral containers, serverless functions, and service-mesh–enabled workloads that are dynamically instantiated and terminated. While Transport Layer Security (TLS) and classical public-key cryptographic mechanisms currently provide confidentiality and authentication for inter-service communication, these approaches are increasingly inadequate in the presence of emerging quantum computing capabilities. In particular, widely deployed algorithms such as RSA and elliptic curve cryptography (ECC) are vulnerable to quantum attacks, exposing long-lived secrets, archived data, and east–west service traffic to “harvest-now, decrypt-later” adversarial strategies. Moreover, existing encryption and key management solutions are not designed to provide true end-to-end encryption (E2EE) across highly dynamic microservices boundaries, nor do they adequately support crypto-agility in cloud-native environments. This paper proposes a scalable, quantum-resistant end-to-end encryption management framework tailored for cloud-native microservices ecosystems. The framework integrates post-quantum cryptographic (PQC) key exchange mechanisms with automated, policy-driven key lifecycle management to secure both data-in-motion and data-at-rest across heterogeneous deployment models. By decoupling cryptographic control planes from application logic and leveraging service identity–based trust establishment, the proposed approach enables seamless E2EE without disrupting microservice scalability or elasticity. Experimental evaluation conducted on a Kubernetes-based microservices testbed demonstrates that the framework achieves strong quantum-resilient security guarantees with manageable latency overhead, while supporting high-throughput service-to-service communication and rapid key rotation. The results indicate that quantum-resistant encryption can be practically integrated into modern cloud-native systems, providing a future-proof security foundation for next-generation distributed applications.
The rapid adoption of cloud infrastructures has intensified concerns regarding data confidentiality, integrity, and trust management, particularly in the presence of emerging quantum computing threats. Classical cryptographic mechanisms, which underpin most existing cloud security architectures, are increasingly vulnerable to quantum attacks capable of compromising public-key encryption and key exchange protocols. To address these challenges, this paper proposes a hybrid security framework that integrates Quantum Cryptography with Blockchain technology to achieve robust, future-resistant data protection in cloud environments. The proposed framework leverages Quantum Key Distribution (QKD) to enable provably secure key generation and exchange based on quantum mechanical principles, ensuring resistance against eavesdropping and computational attacks. Blockchain technology is employed to provide decentralized trust, immutable audit trails, and transparent access control across distributed cloud services. Smart contracts enforce fine-grained security policies, automate authentication, and ensure tamper-proof data access logging. The synergy between quantum cryptography and blockchain establishes a secure key lifecycle, resilient identity management, and verifiable data integrity within multi-tenant cloud infrastructures. Comprehensive security analysis demonstrates that the proposed approach effectively mitigates quantum-enabled attacks, insider threats, and single-point-of-failure vulnerabilities commonly found in traditional cloud security models. Experimental evaluation and comparative analysis highlight improvements in data integrity assurance, key management robustness, and trust transparency, with acceptable computational and communication overhead. The results indicate that integrating quantum cryptography with blockchain presents a scalable and future-proof security paradigm for next-generation cloud infrastructures.
The modernization of distributed energy systems introduces complex cybersecurity challenges as grid infrastructures become increasingly digitized, decentralized, and web-connected. This paper presents a novel security architecture that integrates quantum key distribution (QKD) with semantic web technologies to provide end-to-end secure, scalable, and adaptive protection for distributed energy resource (DER) networks. The proposed framework features a modular system design, incorporating BB84-based QKD protocols for quantum-resilient key generation, a metadata-driven policy layer using OWL ontologies and SWRL reasoning, and a web interface for operator access and real-time monitoring. Extensive performance evaluation in a simulated multi-domain microgrid environment demonstrates that the system achieves an average key generation rate of 2.3 kbps with quantum bit error rate (QBER) maintained below 5.2% across 40 km optical links. Session establishment latency averaged 435 ms, 29.8% lower than a traditional TLS/PKI baseline, while semantic access validation achieved 100% accuracy in 42 adversarial test cases. These cases were evaluated using automated semantic validation scripts simulating spoofed roles, malformed sessions, and unauthorized requests. The system sustained encrypted throughput of 110 messages per second per node and maintained service continuity under quantum noise and cross-domain attack simulations. Usability trials with six engineers yielded a system usability scale (SUS) score of 88.3, and the average DER onboarding time was reduced from 10.1 to 5.5 minutes. These findings affirm that QKD-enhanced, semantically governed web architectures can provide strong cryptographic guarantees while supporting dynamic policy enforcement and intuitive user workflows. The proposed solution demonstrates a viable path for deploying future-proof security mechanisms in next-generation smart grid environments.