An Energy-Aware Post-Quantum Ascon–ML-KEM Cryptographic Framework for Low-Latency UAV Remote Sensing Communications

UAV-based remote sensing systems are increasingly deployed in smart surveillance, disaster response, environmental monitoring, and critical infrastructure inspection. In these applications, aerial sensing platforms must transmit telemetry, control commands, and observation data securely and reliably under strict latency, energy, and computational constraints. However, existing security approaches often fail to jointly provide lightweight payload confidentiality, quantum-resilient key establishment, and adaptive communication protection suitable for dynamic and resource-constrained aerial sensing environments. To address this challenge, this paper proposes an energy-aware post-quantum hybrid cryptographic framework for secure and low-latency UAV remote sensing communications in UAV–IoT mission networks. The proposed framework integrates Ascon-based authenticated encryption for low-overhead protection of remote sensing payloads and mission telemetry, ML-KEM-based post-quantum session-key establishment for long-term resilience against quantum-era threats, and an AI-driven adaptive rekeying mechanism that dynamically adjusts key-refresh decisions according to threat level, residual energy, mobility state, channel stability, anomaly density, traffic sensitivity, link type, and mission progression. Accordingly, rekeying is treated not as a static maintenance process but as an intelligent and context-aware cryptographic control function that adapts communication security to evolving mission and sensing conditions. The framework is evaluated across twenty progressively demanding scenarios involving different UAV counts, sensor densities, payload sizes, communication modes, and adversarial settings relevant to real-time remote sensing operations. Experimental results demonstrate a secure delivery rate of 99.2%, attack detection and mitigation effectiveness of 98.9%, end-to-end encryption latency of 8.7 ms, throughput of 5.03 Mbps, energy overhead of 11.6 mJ/session, rekeying overhead of 2.9 mJ/event, session resilience of 96.4%, and integrity verification success of 99.1%. These findings show that the proposed framework provides a practical and scalable contribution to post-quantum secure UAV remote sensing by unifying lightweight authenticated encryption, ML-KEM-based quantum-resilient key establishment, and AI-driven adaptive rekeying within a resilient aerial–terrestrial communication architecture.