Quantum Cryptography-as-a-Service for Secure UAV Communication: Applications, Challenges, and Case Study

The sudden demand rises in security made researchers come up with solutions that provide instantaneous safety better than the state of the art solutions. The quest for securing data began in the Spartan era. People are now looking to expand this field of research by attacking the existing paradigms and inventing new algorithms that prove to be better than their vulnerable counterparts. Unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs) are very much prevailing due to their sleek design and flexible mobility in many sectors such as agriculture, army, healthcare, monitoring and surveillance, and many more. We discuss the growth and demand of drone technology along with its importance in this article. The paper also throws some light on the ongoing security issues in real-time scenarios and the role of quantum cryptography in securing the information over the traditional solutions. Motivated by this, we present a survey on quantum cryptography's importance, role, and benefits in securing UAV communications underlying beyond 5G networks. A novel quantum cryptography-based layered architectural solution is also proposed to achieve high data security and efficient transmission. This paper also present a case study on the battlefield application on the Internet of military things. The performance of the proposed case study system is evaluated by considering the latency, security, and reliability.