UAV-assisted sensing in dense smart-city IoT deployments requires trust-aware coordination under post-quantum adversarial models, fluctuating node behavior, and high-rate heterogeneous telemetry. This study introduces a quantum resilience trust architecture that couples probabilistic trust dynamics with hybrid post-quantum cryptography for real-time UAV–IoT coordination. At the edge, UAVs act as mobile trust agents that compute QRNG-driven interaction states and behavior vectors, combining task fidelity, entropy, and interaction history into structured descriptors that parameterize local trust. These descriptors are transformed at the fog layer by a Quantum Probabilistic Trust Model, which encodes trust as density matrices with non-commutative evidence operators, enabling order-sensitive updates and interference between heterogeneous trust cues. A Secure Trust Flow Algorithm then maps trust-state gradients and control signals to tri-level admission decisions (allow, defer, block) and feeds reinforcement updates back into the trust dynamics. A hybrid cryptographic engine integrates Kyber-based key encapsulation and Dilithium signatures with conditionally activated QKD, producing trust-aware session keys, adaptive rekeying, and post-quantum-secure channel authentication. A cloud-level ledger records PQC-protected trust trajectories and synthesizes time-varying trust maps that guide application governance, including flow prioritization, anomaly isolation, and cooperative route reconfiguration. Simulation in the inD traffic dataset under multiple attack classes achieves 95.1% accuracy in trust classification, 2.33% false positive rate, 2.65s mean trust response delay and 451 ops/s throughput with 200 UAV nodes.
Awan et al. (Thu,) studied this question.