Adaptive Quantum-Classical Hybrid Authentication: Dynamic Protocol Switching for Real-Time Threat Mitigation
Abrar Galib Zaman, Montasir Qasymeh · Preprints.org · 2025
Quantum computing is a threat to the existence of classical cryptographic authentication. Although quantum key distribution (QKD) has quantitative security, its real-life implementation is interfered with due to two reasons: the resource scalability and the availability of an authenticated classical channel. The presented paper proposes a new system, termed as Adaptive Hybrid Authentication Framework (AHAF), as a solution to these issues as it switches dynamically between classical, post-quantum, and quantum authentication protocols. An AHAF is based on a Reinforcement Learning (RL) based decision engine that transforms the problem of protocol selection into a Markov Decision Process (MDP). A multi-objective reward function is maximised by the RL agent, where the security posture, resources consumption in the system and performance are balanced according to real-time threats intelligence and resource availability. The AHAF was structured and verified in some high-fidelity simulation environment that incorporates NetSquid and NS-3. The findings clarify that the AHAF system is a capable solution that prevents a variety of simulated threats and meets the hypothesis of expected uptime (99.9 percent). This is achieved by carefully assigning expensive quantum protocols on a need-to-use basis and so providing QKD level of protection without incurring prohibitive performance cost of a fixed implementation. We have determined that an RL-based learning strategy most readily delivers workable and competitive road map towards feasible quantum-safe communication networks.