Intelligent Quantum Security Framework for Smart Cyber-Physical Environments

Cyber-Physical Systems (CPS) have become an essential part of modern smart environments, such as smart cities, healthcare systems, industrial automation, intelligent transportation, and smart energy grids. These systems are coupled with physical devices, computational intelligence and communication networks for real-time monitoring and autonomous decision-making. However, the increasing interconnectivity of CPS makes them vulnerable to sophisticated cyber attacks that can compromise the integrity, confidentiality and availability of the system. Moreover, the rapid progress in quantum computing poses a serious threat to conventional public-key cryptography algorithms such as RSA and Elliptic Curve Cryptography (ECC), which are susceptible to quantum-based attacks. This paper presents an Intelligent Quantum Security Framework (IQSF) for smart cyber-physical environments to address these emerging security issues. The proposed framework combines the threat detection based on Artificial Intelligence (AI) and Post-Quantum Cryptography (PQC) to design a multi-layered security architecture. CRYSTALS-Kyber is used for post-quantum key encapsulation and CRYSTALS-Dilithium is used for post-quantum digital signature-based authentication. Furthermore, the intelligent anomaly detection module continuously monitors network traffic and identifies malicious activities prior to the establishment of secure communication. The framework provides secure authentication, encrypted communication, intelligent intrusion detection and resilient data protection against classical and quantum-enabled cyber attacks. Experimental evaluation shows that the proposed framework improves the authentication security, communication confidentiality, attack detection accuracy and long-term cryptographic resilience while maintaining acceptable computational overhead. The proposed solution is applicable for smart cities, industrial Internet of Things (IIoT), healthcare infrastructures, autonomous transportation systems, and other mission-critical cyber-physical environments requiring next-generation quantum secure communication.