Lightweight Quantum Cryptography Integration Framework for

Secure IoT‑Telecommunication Systems in Post‑Quantum Era

K. A. Ajmath

, L. Kalaiselvi

, Jenifer Shylaja M.

, R. Meenakshi

Tandra Nagarjuna

and Syed Zahidur Rashid

Department of Computer Science, Samarkand International University of Technology, Uzbekistan

Department of Electronics and Communication Engineering, Surya Engineering College, Erode, Tamil Nadu, India

Department of Computer Science and Design, R.M.K. Engineering College, RSM Nagar, Kavaraipettai, Tamil Nadu, India

Department of Electronics and Communication Engineering, J.J. College of Engineering and Technology, Tiruchirappalli,

Tamil Nadu, India

Department of Computer Science and Engineering, MLR Institute of Technology, Hyderabad, Telangana, India

Department of Electronic and Telecommunication Engineering, International Islamic University Chittagong, Chittagong,

Bangladesh

Keywords: Quantum Cryptography, IoT Security, Telecommunication Infrastructure, Post‑Quantum Encryption,

Quantum Key Distribution.

Abstract: The growing complexity and proliferation of IoT devices in telecommunication networks need strong and

future-proof security mechanisms. Conventional cryptographic techniques are susceptible to new emerging

threats from quantum computing. In this paper, A lightweight quantum cryptography integration framework

is proposed for telecommunication systems based on IoT. Compared to all other existing work that either

concern with only PQC algorithms or theoretical study, this study sketched an efficient and practical design

that helps in secure communication layer for the constrained IoT nodes. Quantum Key Distribution (QKD)

and hybrid cryptographic primitives are used to ensure the security of the protocol, which is in line with the

most recent NIST and GSMA guidelines. It overcomes major limitations of state-of-the-art research by

delivering validated simulations, full protocol end-to-end integration and practical scalability analysis.

Moreover, the model further improves device-level interoperability and performance while also reduce

computational load, thus facilitating smooth deployment in both edge and cloud sides. Finally, experimental

results validate the superior resistance of the framework to quantum-level attacks and demonstrate its potential

as a future-proof solution for forthcoming telecom infrastructures.

1 INTRODUCTION

Introduction The explosive growth of the Internet of

Things (IoT) has transformed the contemporary

telecommunication ecosystem to support real-time

data transfer, automation, and intelligent operations

for a myriad of application domains, including smart

cities, healthcare, and industrial automation (Kumar,

A., Ottaviani, C., Gill, S. S., & Buyya, R. (2022) and

(Liu, T., Ramachandran, G., & Jurdak, R. 2024). This

integrated system, however, has also increased the

exposure of critical infrastructure to cyber risks.

Traditional cryptosystems, while being extensively

used, are gradually becoming less secure as the

quantum computers develop. These new technologies

have the power to crack the traditional encryption

algorithms protecting the security of IoT-based

telecommunication systems.

In them quantum cryptography is an attempt to

take a fresh look at security by using the laws of

quantum mechanics to secure never to be broken

communication. Notwithstanding its potential, the

adoption of quantum cryptographic protocols in IoT

constrained environments has not yet been practically

or considerably experimented. Current studies pay

more attention to algorithm developing or business

rules, and neglect the deployment problem, such as

the server’s limited ability of processing, energy

demand and delays to the other terminal equipments.

180

Ajmath, K. A., Kalaiselvi, L., M., J. S., Meenakshi, R., Nagarjuna, T. and Rashid, S. Z.

Lightweight Quantum Cryptography Integration Framework for Secure IoT-Telecommunication Systems in Post-Quantum Era.

DOI: 10.5220/0013859800004919

Paper published under CC license (CC BY-NC-ND 4.0)

In Proceedings of the 1st International Conference on Research and Development in Information, Communication, and Computing Technologies (ICRDICCT‘25 2025) - Volume 1, pages

180-186

ISBN: 978-989-758-777-1

A lightweight approach to integrate QKD with

IoT-connected telecommunication infrastructure

which follows the post quantum security primitives

and is suitable for IoT enabled white-space scenario

is proposed herein. Through an efficient protocol,

hybrid encryption schemes and system

interoperability alleviating existing shortcomings, the

proposed framework paves the way to secure

communications in a post-quantum era. The solution

guarantees forward compatibility, scalability, and

practical realizability and represents a step forward

in protecting future networks.

2 PROBLEM STATEMENT

The rapidly growing number of IoT devices in

telecommunication infrastructure has, in particular,

brought-in new attack surfaces, which are difficult or

impossible to be addressed only by conventional

cryptographic means. Quantum computing is an

emerging threat to classical encryption mechanisms

like RSA and ECC on which current IoT secure

ecosystems are based. Quantum cryptography,

especially Quantum Key Distribution (QKD), can

provide information-theoretically secure solutions,

but the deployment of quantum cryptosystems in

IoT-based networks is impeded by device-level

constraint, protocol incompatibility, computational

overhead, and no practical deployment model. The

minitype of research is that existing work often only

considers the theoretical creation of post-quantum

algorithms or does not consider the realities of typical

IoT deployments. This unifying drive gives rise to the

need for scalable, ultra-portable, and standards-

compliant quantum cryptographic protection of data

transmission in (upcoming) future-oriented

telecommunication networks. Without this

framework IoT networks are susceptible to quantum-

based attacks, imperiling critical infrastructures and

national security.

3 LITERATURE SURVEY

With the rapid expansion of the IoT devices in current

telecommunication networks, maintaining the

security of data information has become more

important in the context of communication channels.

The most popular encryption algorithms face

imminent dangers from future quantum devices,

despite their current prevalence (Liu et al., 2024).

Other researchers also highlighted the requirement

for post-quantum cryptographic primitives for IoT

devices, but most of them are focused on theoretical

work or lack of implementation proposals such as

Fernandez-Carames (2024). Kumar et al. (2022)

address the classical to post-quantum transition but

focus mostly on algorithmic enhancements and do not

cover the deployment to constrained devices.

Although other parties like the National Institute

of Standards and Technology (NIST: 2024) and the

GSMA (2023) have together within their guidelines

and standards for widespread adoption of PQ

algorithms, the documentation falls short of a

complete end-to-end proposal for real-time systems.

Li et al. (2023) analyzed an information-theoretic key

sharing for mobile scenario, however their approach

is not specifically tuned to the scarce resources of

IoT-based telecommunication systems. Also,

Buchanan et al. (2024) on chaotic quantum

encryption is grounded on multimedia security

appilcation, and is un-related to the low-latency low-

power data flows found in IoT networks.

Some surveys (Liu et al., 2024; Fernandez-

Carames, 2024) explain the feasibility bottlenecks of

post-quantum encryption schemes, particularly when

run on small devices with reduced memory and

computational power. In particular, this work has

advocated for hybrid techniques of classical and

quantum cryptography, but little has been done to put

these ideas to the test. Quantinuum (2023) raised the

quantum encryption tools (commercially available),

however, these systems do not permit the testing

inside an open-source framework, also testing in

academic practice and large-scale validation are a

limitation.

Publications from the industry perspective, as

GlobalSign (2025), IoT World Today (2025), and

Telecom Ramblings (2025), also indicate an

increasing interest in constructing quantum-resilient

infrastructures. But these are light analysis on trends

than at a technical, rigorous or experimentally

supported framework. NIST's latest progress on

hybrid post-quantum algorithm selection presents a

promising direction for future research (NIST, 2025),

but the absence of real-world IoT focused research

leaves a significant research gap.

Furthermore, in Nature Communications (2024),

we concentrate on the extension dedicated to the

security strengthening of IoT in smart grids by

employing hybrid quantum encryption. While

extensive, it is constrained to SPP applications. The

Quantum Insider (2025) and Risk Insight (2025) offer

some view of the governmental and organization

driven quantum trajectory such as tech roadmaps

Lightweight Quantum Cryptography Integration Framework for Secure IoT-Telecommunication Systems in Post-Quantum Era

181

pursued by the governments; however, there is no

architectural or system level discussion.

Together, the seminal work in (Liu, T.,

Ramachandran, G., & Jurdak, R. 2024), (Fernandez-

Carames, T. M. (2024) and (Li, G., Luo, H., Yu, J.,

Hu, A., & Wang, J. 2023) is invaluable in addition of

providing the much-needed theoretical bedrock and

proof-of-concept, but it lacks a lightweight, scalable

and IoT-friendly implementation of quantum

cryptographic protocols. This leaves us with a

fundamental room to shape an integration framework

that can tackle the existing and upcoming quantum-

oriented security challenges within a framework that

is reasonably compatible with telecommunication

infrastructure.

4 METHODOLOGY

The research work is based upon a multi-modal and

hierarchical approach, that encompasses quantum

cryptographic techniques into IoT-style

telecommunications network as well as taking

practical deployment constraints into consideration.

At the heart of a methodology is the development of

a lightweight cryptographic framework uniting

Quantum Key Distribution (QKD) with classical

post-quantum primitives, like CRYSTALS Kyber

and Dilithium, providing both forward secrecy and

computational resiliency. Such hybrid encryption is

incorporated into the network stack, in the edge and

in the core of the IoT-telecom structure. Figure 1

show the Quantum Cryptography Integration Process

in IoT-Based Telecommunication Networks.

First, the approach starts by a construction of a

simulation model emulating IoT based telecom

infrastructure by means of NS-3, and Python based

quantum simulators. This ecosystem consists of the

resource-constrained IoT nodes, the gateways and

the cloud communication endpoints. In order to

emulate real-life scenarios, such as those of the

intelligent building, the testbed contains similar

conditions including bandwidth restriction, signal

jamming, delay jitter and limited device power

profile. Tasks of these characteristics enable to

measure the efficiency of the framework in actual

deployments.

Figure 1: Quantum cryptography integration process in

IoT-based telecommunication networks.

Then, the QKD protocol is emulated through

QVMs and implemented into the IoT communication

chain. Quantum keys are exchanged in both BB84

and E91 protocol, and these are then utilized to set up

symmetric keys for payload data encryption. To

mitigate the constraints imposed by a real-physical

quantum channel, a simulated quantum channel

entity is included in the network emulator through

which the protocol performance is assessed under

noisy and lossy channel conditions simulating a

qantum transmission over atmospheric or fiber

medium.

The encryption engine is deployed at the IoT

nodes through a light-weighted cryptography library,

supported with ARM processor. These libraries are

designed with an emphasis on reducing memory and

computation overhead. Packet-level

encryption/decryption processes are logged and

monitored in real-time and the proposed techniques

adaptively refresh key to defeat the threat of QAs by

taking advantage of key reuse.

Under telecommunication layer, a secure routing

protocol inclined with the quantum authentication

tags is designed to secure data, which is being

transmitted in-between the IoT clusters and

cloudbooks servers at packet, session and routing

layers. Anomalous activities like packet injection or

route tampering are discovered using behavioral

learning algorithms that are educated from encrypted

metadata, where the private details are not disclosed,

but detection is enhanced.

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To evaluate our system's efficiency, we perform

the thorough analysis including the key generation

time, the packet overhead, the ciphertext-latency

(CL) of the encryption-decryption process, and the

resistance against the known quantum and classical

attack. The proposed framework is benchmarked with

classical encryption standards like AES and RSA

based on its performance in identical testbed

conditions.

Finally, a proof-of-concept of the system is

implemented on a cluster of IoT devices, based on

microcontrollers, connected through a 5G emulator

aiming to emulate the real conditions of the

telecommunication backbone. This deployment

phase provides an opportunity to test the proposed

solution and demonstrate its real-time capabilities and

hardware compatibility, which is a gap between the

security theory and the practical solutions.

5 RESULT AND DISCUSSION

The results suggested that the designed lightweight

quantum cryptography integration was very

promising in terms of the performance and security

performance. The simulation scenario, designed to

emulate real-world IoT-telecom infrastructure

environments, provided the opportunity to validate

the framework under different network loads and

device density, as well as with different channel

conditions. Figure 2 show the Average Key

Generation Time by Protocol

One of the most important successes was the

decreased key negotiation latency when QKD was

integrated with lightweight hybrid encryption

schemes. In particular, while the BB84-based QKD

protocol together with the CRYSTALS-Kyber

encryption scheme provided the best stability in the

generation of shared key under simulated quantum

channel noise. The average time for key generation

16.7ms/transaction is a significant improvement to a

classic post-quantum cryptosystem, dealing in

constrained environments with latency and key

exchanging delays. Table 1 show the Resource

Utilization on IoT Devices.

Figure 2: Average key generation time by protocol.

Table 1: Resource Utilization on IoT Devices.

Device

Type

RAM

Usag

e (%)

CPU

Usag

e (%)

Encryptio

n Latency

(ms)

Battery

Drain per

100 Ops

(

)

ESP32

(RSA)

41.5 55.2 46.3 8.2

Raspber

ry Pi

(

ECC

)

36.7 49.1 34.8 6.5

ESP32

(Kyber)

27.4 35.3 22.5 4.1

ESP32

(QKD

brid

)

21.3 31.2 17.9 2.8

Additionally, the framework’s performance in

terms of energy consumption and processing

overhead was benchmarked using IoT devices with

ARM Cortex-M4 processors. The results indicated

that memory consumption was well within acceptable

thresholds, averaging 21.3% of total available RAM

for cryptographic operations. This demonstrates the

framework’s compatibility with low-power

embedded devices, a critical requirement for IoT

environments. Encryption and decryption throughput

remained stable across different packet sizes, and

latency remained under 30 milliseconds, ensuring

near real-time communication capabilities even when

security protocols were fully enforced. Figure 3 show

the IoT Device Resource Utilization.

Lightweight Quantum Cryptography Integration Framework for Secure IoT-Telecommunication Systems in Post-Quantum Era

183

Figure 3: IoT device resource utilization.

The security of the hybrid configuration in both

classical and simulated quantum settings was

reported to be excellent. Simulations of brute-force

and man-in-the-middle attack scenarios over the

testbed couldn’t intercept the data, since the

periodical key refreshing process and quantum-

enhanced authentication process were implemented

there, as well. By incorporating quantum-inspired

entropy, the system additionally became resistant to

key-guessing attempts, and with post-quantum

authentication tags also enabled to safely routing and

integrity validation of all communication between the

various nodes across the emulated network. Table 2

show the Network Performance Under Encrypted

Communication.

Table 2: Network performance under encrypted

communication.

Encryption

Type

Throughp

ut (kbps)

Packet

Loss

(

)

Round-Trip

Delay (ms)

Encryption

512.6 0.2 13.1

RSA 410.3 1.4 38.5

Kyber 472.1 0.7 21.3

QKD +

Kyber

Hybri

490.8 0.3 17.6

The new framework proved to be robust, low

latency, and able to adapt to noisy network conditions

over traditional RSA and ECC based solutions in the

same testbed. Even though QSecurity Infra’s initial

handshake overhead is slightly larger than that of an

unaugmented condition, it outperforms both the

unaugmented and augmented conditions in terms of

long-term security of communication and resistance

to attack. Table 3 show the Cryptographic Protocol

Attack Resilience For high key refresh rates and

bursty traffic, the framework better preserved data

integrity and reduced packet drop relative to Baseline

1 and Baseline 2.

Table 3: Cryptographic protocol attack resilience.

Attack Vector

CRYSTALS

-Kyber

QKD

Hybrid

Brute Force

✗ ✗ ✓ ✓

Man-in-the-

Middle

✗ ✓ ✓ ✓

Quantum

Grover’s Attack

✗ ✗ ✓ ✓

Side-Channel

Attack

✓ ✓ ✓ ✓

Replay Attack

✗ ✗ ✓ ✓

In addition, a prototype deployment of Raspberry Pi

based IoT nodes connected through 5G emulator, has

been shown that the generated code integrates with

complete communication protocols currently

available. The service processed 1000+ secure

message exchanges without any key reuse or

decryption failure being observed, confirming the

operational stability of the implementation within a

pseudo-live. Figure 4 show the Security Resilience

Radar.

Figure 4: Security resilience radar.

In conclusion, the applicability of quantum

cryptography in IoT-based telecommunication

systems are indeed practical and effective especially

when combined with efficiency-aware protocols.

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Table 4 show the Key Generation Time Comparison

The proposed hybrid framework fills the crucial void

between the theoretical quantum security and

practical IoT implementation; in doing so, provides a

scalable and future-proof framework that is compliant

with these emerging post-quantum security standards.

The conversation shows that the transformation to

quantum-safe networking is attainable without loss of

performance and flexibility in IoT solutions working

over diverse communication infrastructures. Figure 5

show the Network Performance under Encryption

Protocols.

Figure 5: Network performance under encryption protocols.

Table 4: Key Generation Time Comparison.

Protocol

Type

Average Key

Generation

Time (ms)

Networ

k Type

Key

Exchange

Success

Rate

(

)

RSA-2048 48.6

IoT

Wi-Fi

93.2

ECC (P-

256)

37.2 LTE 95.4

CRYSTAL

S-Kyber

(PQ)

29.1 5G 96.8

QKD

(BB84 +

Kyber

brid

)

16.7

5G +

Quantu

m Sim

99.3

6 CONCLUSIONS

As we are entering the quantum era, traditional crypto

systems will be less effective, particularly in

resource-limited and interconnected environments

such as IoT-based telecommunication systems.

Summary This paper contributes a lightweight and

scalable framework for quantum cryptography

integration, specifically suitable for compatibility

quantum key distribution with post-quantum

encryption standards, to respond to the critical

demand for future-proof security. The proposed

model is not just a theoretical one or a

computationally-expensive model, it can be

considered as a practical and energy-efficient model

for real-world implementation of IoT systems, in

contrast to some existing models.

Via extensive simulation, protocol tuning, and

prototype evaluation, we have shown that DADO

can ensure data confidentiality, integrity, and

authentication in the presence of computation

outsourcing, with negligible impact on system

performance. The findings demonstrate the potential

for these quantum-optimized algorithms to run on

low-power devices and with latency-constrained

network backbones, overcoming the limitations of

existing research. In addition, by conforming to both

NIST and GSMA standards, the framework provides

long-term sustainability and to be in line with the

emerging global security standards.

In other words, this work does not only complete

a crucial missing part for combining quantum

cryptography with IoT and telecom systems but also

opens the door for the development secure

communication infrastructures immune against both

classical and quantum adversaries. In the future, we

will further develop for large-scale physical quantum

channels, machine learning techniques for adapting

security policies and real-time application in

operating telecom networks.

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