ABSTRACT This paper presents a simulation- and model-based study — all results are derived from validated simulation frameworks rather than physical hardware measurements — of the post-quantum migration of unmanned aerial vehicle (UAV) command-and-control links. The advent of cryptographically relevant quantum computers (CRQCs) fundamentally threatens the security of unmanned aerial systems (UAS), particularly command and control links that rely on classical public-key cryptography. Compounded by "harvest now, decrypt later” strategies, this necessitates a proactive transition to post-quantum cryptography (PQC). We develop a quantum threat model for UAV communications and evaluates a migration pathway anchored by the NIST-standardized ML-KEM (Kyber) algorithm. We model and benchmark ML-KEM on a simulated ARM Cortex-M4-class flight controller plat-form, analysing computational performance, memory footprint, energy consumption, and real-time scheduling behaviour. Results demonstrate that ML-KEM-768 encapsulation reduces latency by approximately 39% compared to elliptic curve Diffie-Hellman, while a hybrid ECDH+ML-KEM-768 configuration introduces moderate computational and memory overhead. However, the substantial increase in ciphertext size creates critical fragmentation bottlenecks on low-bandwidth telemetry links such as LoRa, motivating a proposed symmetric key derivation architecture for bandwidth-efficient rekeying. Side-channel analysis under an idealised leakage model confirms susceptibility to correlation power analysis, highlighting the necessity for hardened implementations. Furthermore, real-time operating system scheduling simulations under a two-task discrete-event model reveal that naive task co-scheduling induces significant jitter, necessitating strict priority isolation to maintain flight controller determinism. These findings establish simulation-grounded guidance for integrating PQC into resource-constrained UAV platforms without compromising real-time performance or communication reliability.
ABSTRACT This paper presents a simulation- and model-based study — all results are derived from validated simulation frameworks rather than physical hardware measurements — of the post-quantum migration of unmanned aerial vehicle (UAV) command-and-control links. The advent of cryptographically relevant quantum computers (CRQCs) fundamentally threatens the security of unmanned aerial systems (UAS), particularly command and control links that rely on classical public-key cryptography. Compounded by "harvest now, decrypt later” strategies, this necessitates a proactive transition to post-quantum cryptography (PQC). We develop a quantum threat model for UAV communications and evaluates a migration pathway anchored by the NIST-standardized ML-KEM (Kyber) algorithm. We model and benchmark ML-KEM on a simulated ARM Cortex-M4-class flight controller plat-form, analysing computational performance, memory footprint, energy consumption, and real-time scheduling behaviour. Results demonstrate that ML-KEM-768 encapsulation reduces latency by approximately 39% compared to elliptic curve Diffie-Hellman, while a hybrid ECDH+ML-KEM-768 configuration introduces moderate computational and memory overhead. However, the substantial increase in ciphertext size creates critical fragmentation bottlenecks on low-bandwidth telemetry links such as LoRa, motivating a proposed symmetric key derivation architecture for bandwidth-efficient rekeying. Side-channel analysis under an idealised leakage model confirms susceptibility to correlation power analysis, highlighting the necessity for hardened implementations. Furthermore, real-time operating system scheduling simulations under a two-task discrete-event model reveal that naive task co-scheduling induces significant jitter, necessitating strict priority isolation to maintain flight controller determinism. These findings establish simulation-grounded guidance for integrating PQC into resource-constrained UAV platforms without compromising real-time performance or communication reliability.
The seamless integration of Unmanned Aerial Systems (UAS) into public airspace necessitates a robust UAV Traffic Management (UTM) system. Information security in communications plays a pivotal role in ensuring the operational safety of the UTM. Maintaining the integrity and authentication of unicast communications, such as command and video information, is imperative to thwart tampering and impersonation. Encryption emerges as an optimal solution for safeguarding such data. Efficient utilization of symmetrical encryption mandates the imple-mentation of secure key exchange mechanisms. However, intro-ducingAuthenticated Key Exchange (AKE) standards on diminutive Unmanned Aerial Vehicles (UAVs) encounters problems due to hardware limitations. To surmount this challenge, lightweight cryptographic algorithms tailored for resource-constrained hard-ware have been developed. Nonetheless, both lightweight and conventional cryptographic algorithms are susceptible to quantum computing threats. In response, post-quantum cryptographic primitives are undergoing standardization. This study assesses post-quantumKey Encapsulation Mechanism (KEM) candidates, namely CRYSTALS-Kyber, Hamming Quasi-Cyclic (HQC), and BIKE, on hardware resembling small UAVs. The evaluation of these algorithms focuses on computation time, considering real-time tasks during flights. The findings affirm the viability of employing unmodified standards on resource-constrained hardware concurrently with other priority tasks. Furthermore, quantum-vulnerable standards are also investigated to compare their performance against their more secure counterparts. All three post-quantum KEM candidates demonstrate usability in this environment, with CRYSTALS-Kyber being recommended for its superior performance, even surpassing certain prevailing standards.
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.
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.
The rapid advancement of quantum technology brings significant trouble to the public key encryption standards used presently. Traditional cryptographic algorithms rely on the complexity of a specific number of theoretical problems, but the computational capabilities of large-scale quantum computers would swiftly compromise these specific mathematics-based cryptographic algorithms. These quantum technology-based computers consist of millions of qubits which can enable them to damage nearly all modern public-key cryptographic systems. This security issue is particularly concerning Internet of Things (IoT) devices, which typically have limited resources and are thus more susceptible to emerging threats from quantum computing. To address this concern, the National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST) has started the process of standardizing Post-Quantum Cryptography (PQC). In this paper, a detailed taxonomy of lightweight PQC algorithms are presented. The performance analysis of NIST Round 3 finalist (CRYSTALS-Kyber, SABER, NTRU and NTRU Encrypt) is done on a real Unmanned Aerial Vehicle (UAV) environment. The performance of these algorithms is analyzed with respect to the ten essential metrics such as throughput, latency, power consumption, energy consumption, memory usage, clock cycles, etc., for different payloads. The experimental results for each performance metrics is plotted individually for better analysis. The experimental result show that the SABER cipher outperforms other post-quantum ciphers.
The migration of Internet of Things (IoT) systems to post-quantum cryptography (PQC) is essential to ensure long-term security against quantum enabled adversaries. However, the large computational, memory, and communication overheads of PQC algorithms pose challenges for resource-constrained IoT environments. In practice, IoT platforms span a wide range of capabilities, from battery-powered sensors to gateway devices, making a one-size-fits-all configuration impractical. This paper presents a new methodology for selecting suitable PQC schemes based on RFC 7228 device classes. We introduce the Efficiency-Adjusted Security for Post-Quantum Cryptography (EAS-PQC) metric that considers security strength, latency, energy consumption, memory footprint, communication overhead, and protocol reliability. Device-class-specific constraints and weighting profiles are incorporated to reflect the operational priorities of Class 0, Class 1, and Class 2 IoT devices. Our evaluation primarily uses performance benchmarks from the PQM4 framework, which are based on ARM Cortex-M4 microcontroller profiles, and performance results from several work on similar embedded platforms. Energy consumption is estimated using a constant active power model derived from Cortex-M4 power characteristics. We evaluate multiple PQC candidates, including ML-KEM and ML-DSA, and the results show a quantitative mapping between IoT device classes and PQC schemes. Specifically, Saber-LightSaber is identified as the most suitable option for Class 0 devices, while ML-DSA-87 combined with ML-KEM-768 achieves the highest overall scores for Class 1 and Class 2 devices. Our findings improve feasibility and efficiency by up to 30–40% compared to static baseline configurations. With these findings, we recommend EAS-PQC as a useful tool for the assessment of post-quantum security in industrial IoT systems.
Unencrypted communications between unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs) are susceptible to various security attacks, such as interception and spoofing. Both symmetric and asymmetric cryptography currently allow for secure communication between parties. However, industry and academia are working on implementing quantum computers, which will invalidate several of the most widely used cryptographic algorithms. As researchers develop novel quantum encryption methods, they will need standardized testing approaches to determine which are most optimal, especially for the unique characteristics of UAV systems. This paper describes a methodology to test and measure the efficiency of key exchange algorithms for a UAV communicating with a ground control station (GCS). The method requires a framework that models a UAV performing tasks while communicating in encrypted messages with the GCS. In addition, the calculations used for comparing algorithms require a purpose-built bandwidth equation for the quantum algorithm. The first test of this methodology is an experiment designed to compare classical key exchange with the 256-bit Advanced Encryption Standard (AES-256) and quantum key distribution (QKD) used with a variety of parameters in the framework. A comparison of the runtime of each model facilitates the evaluation of each key exchange algorithm for UAV systems. This methodology can be used to test the efficiency of other post-quantum cryptographic algorithms in the future.