A tertiary review on quantum cryptography

2025-05-29

AI Summary

Quantum computers pose an existential threat to current public-key cryptography, necessitating urgent development of quantum-safe technologies. This study conducts the first three-tier bibliometric and systematic review of quantum cryptography, synthesizing insights from 51 review articles indexed in Scopus. Methodologically, it integrates multi-level review synthesis, topic modeling, and challenge clustering to systematically identify QKD’s technological dominance and cross-scheme bottlenecks. Key contributions include: (1) distilling six core challenges—implementation cost, decoherence, key rate, transmission distance, quantum hacking, and quantum error correction; (2) clarifying migration pathways for post-quantum cryptography and critical milestones for quantum cryptographic deployment; and (3) proposing the first three-dimensional analytical framework encompassing technological evolution, implementation barriers, and future research directions—providing empirically grounded guidance for policy formulation and R&D investment.

Technology Category

• Machine Learning: Quantum Machine Learning
• Planning, Routing, and Scheduling: Scheduling under Uncertainty
• Knowledge Representation and Reasoning: Qualitative Reasoning

Application Category

• Security and Privacy: Applications of cryptography
• Economics, Online Markets and Human Computation: Economic aspects of blockchain and cryptocurrencies
• Responsible Web: Measurement, analysis, and circumvention of Web censorship

Abstract

Quantum computers impose an immense threat to system security. As a countermeasure, new cryptographic classes have been created to prevent these attacks. Technologies such as post-quantum cryptography and quantum cryptography. Quantum cryptography uses the principle of quantum physics to produce theoretically unbreakable security. This tertiary review selected 51 secondary studies from the Scopus database and presented bibliometric analysis, a list of the main techniques used in the field, and existing open challenges and future directions in quantum cryptography research. The results showed a prevalence of QKD over other techniques among the selected papers and stated that the field still faces many problems related to implementation cost, error correction, decoherence, key rates, communication distance, and quantum hacking.

Problem

• Quantum computers threaten system security and require new cryptographic solutions
• Quantum cryptography offers theoretically unbreakable security using quantum physics principles
• Challenges include implementation cost, error correction, and quantum hacking in QKD

Innovation

• Post-quantum cryptography for attack prevention
• Quantum physics principles for unbreakable security
• QKD prevalence over other quantum techniques