Simulation study demonstrates accurate detection of adaptive side-channel attacks in quantum smart grids, highlighting enhanced defense for critical cyber-physical systems.
The increasing interconnection of smart-grid operational technology, industrial-edge services, and utility information systems creates a critical need for resilient and continuously monitored industrial cyber-physical communication. Although quantum key distribution (QKD) can strengthen session-key establishment for advanced metering infrastructure, distributed energy resources, substation automation, supervisory control, and utility-core services, practical QKD deployments remain vulnerable to implementation-level side-channel attacks that can compromise the cryptographic protection layer without directly targeting conventional network packets. This paper presents a QKD-secured industrial smart-grid cyber-physical system framework for simulating and detecting adaptive side-channel attacks. The proposed 36-node industrial communication architecture integrates AMI devices, DER controllers, PMU and substation automation components, industrial-edge gateways, QKD modules, key-management services, SCADA and utility-core servers, security-operation-center components, and adversarial access points. A 100,000-record cyber-quantum dataset is generated across 12 operating conditions comprising normal communication and 11 adaptive QKD side-channel attacks: detector blinding, time shift, wavelength switching, Trojan-horse probing, photon-number splitting, decoy-state spoofing, RNG bias, calibration manipulation, local-oscillator manipulation, synchronization spoofing, and combined adaptive quantum hacking. Each scenario introduces coupled primary and secondary perturbations across optical, detector, timing, synchronization, randomness, calibration, photon-statistical, leakage, key-generation, encryption, and industrial-network-performance features. To support intelligent industrial security monitoring, the proposed Quantum-aware Mamba–Kolmogorov–Arnold Network (Q-MambaKAN) organizes device, network, QKD, side-channel, encryption, and risk evidence into an ordered cyber-quantum representation processed through selective state-space learning, side-channel attention, nonlinear KAN mapping, adaptive fusion, and multi-task prediction heads. Results show that the QBER increases from 0.071 during normal operation to 0.426 under combined adaptive quantum hacking, while encryption success decreases from 98.1% to 0%. Q-MambaKAN achieves a 99.48% binary detection accuracy, a 99.70% binary F1-score, a 97.60% multiclass macro-F1, and a risk RMSE of 0.021.
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Alsarhan et al. (2026) studied this question.
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