QuantumShield-IoT: A Quantum-Resilient Hybrid Framework for Secure Data Transmission Using Quantum Key Distribution, Lightweight Cryptography and Blockchain Technology

Abstract

With the growing Internet of Things (IoT), many applications like traffic management, smart cities, environment monitoring, industrial automation and healthcare have been revolutionized. As the number of resourcelimited IoT devices grows and connects with each other, security issues have become more intricate and severe, such as unauthorized access, data tampering, replay attacks, and the rise in threat from quantum computing to traditional cryptographic methods. To solve those problems, this paper proposes Quantum Shield-IoT, which is a quantum-resilient hybrid security framework that combines the Quantum Key Distribution (QKD) protocol of BB84 with ASCON lightweight authenticated encryption, blockchain security, and cloud computing to ensure secure end-to-end data transmission in IoT. The BB84 protocol works both to generate quantum secure cryptographic keys, and to identify eavesdropping via Quantum Bit Error Rate (QBER) analysis. The generated keys are used by ASCON-128 to ensure efficient data confidentiality, integrity and authentication with low computation load, which makes it suitable for resourceconstrained IoT devices. Encrypted data are securely stored in the cloud while the data integrity and traceability of the SHA-256 hash values are ensured by being stored on the blockchain, making them irretrievable. Encrypted data are stored securely in the cloud, while the data integrity and traceability of the hash value ensure irretrievable storage through the blockchain. The proposed framework was implemented using IBM Quantum Qiskit, ASCON-128, blockchain platforms and cloud storage. Experimental results show that quantum bit error rate (QBER) varies from 2.1% to 3.5% for typical communication and 24.8% for eavesdropping attempts, proving reliable QKD. ASCON encryption range was between 8.2 ms and 69.5 ms, and blockchain verification was less than 25 ms for 1,000 transactions with more than 99% of the integrity accuracy. Moreover, the framework achieved an attack detection rate higher than 97.9% in several cyberattacks and hence provided a scalable, light-weight and quantum resistant security solution for next generation IoT ecosystems.