{"status":"ok","message-type":"work","message-version":"1.0.0","message":{"indexed":{"date-parts":[[2026,6,26]],"date-time":"2026-06-26T04:48:39Z","timestamp":1782449319239,"version":"3.54.5"},"reference-count":36,"publisher":"MDPI AG","issue":"3","license":[{"start":{"date-parts":[[2026,6,16]],"date-time":"2026-06-16T00:00:00Z","timestamp":1781568000000},"content-version":"vor","delay-in-days":0,"URL":"https:\/\/creativecommons.org\/licenses\/by\/4.0\/"}],"funder":[{"DOI":"10.13039\/501100014786","name":"Northern Border University","doi-asserted-by":"publisher","award":["NBU-FFR-2026-2119-xx"],"award-info":[{"award-number":["NBU-FFR-2026-2119-xx"]}],"id":[{"id":"10.13039\/501100014786","id-type":"DOI","asserted-by":"publisher"}]},{"award":["NBU-FFR-2026-2119-xx"],"award-info":[{"award-number":["NBU-FFR-2026-2119-xx"]}],"id":[{"id":"https:\/\/ror.org\/03j9tzj20","id-type":"ROR","asserted-by":"publisher"}]}],"content-domain":{"domain":[],"crossmark-restriction":false},"short-container-title":["Cryptography"],"abstract":"<jats:p>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\u2013IoT 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\u2013terrestrial communication architecture.<\/jats:p>","DOI":"10.3390\/cryptography10030039","type":"journal-article","created":{"date-parts":[[2026,6,17]],"date-time":"2026-06-17T03:27:21Z","timestamp":1781666841000},"page":"39","update-policy":"https:\/\/doi.org\/10.3390\/mdpi_crossmark_policy","source":"Crossref","is-referenced-by-count":0,"title":["An Energy-Aware Post-Quantum Ascon\u2013ML-KEM Cryptographic Framework for Low-Latency UAV Remote Sensing Communications"],"prefix":"10.3390","volume":"10","author":[{"given":"Nedal Y.","family":"Al-Tamimi","sequence":"first","affiliation":[{"name":"Department of Artificial Intelligence, Science and Information Technology, Irbid National University, Irbid 21110, Jordan"}],"role":[{"vocabulary":"crossref","role":"author"}]},{"ORCID":"https:\/\/orcid.org\/0009-0007-5389-6778","authenticated-orcid":false,"given":"Mahmoud","family":"AlJamal","sequence":"additional","affiliation":[{"name":"Department of Cybersecurity, Science and Information Technology Faculty, Irbid National University, Irbid 21110, Jordan"}],"role":[{"vocabulary":"crossref","role":"author"}]},{"ORCID":"https:\/\/orcid.org\/0009-0008-1121-2523","authenticated-orcid":false,"given":"Mohammad Q.","family":"Al-Jamal","sequence":"additional","affiliation":[{"name":"Department of Renewable Energy, Technical Faculty, Jadara University, P.O. Box 733, Irbid 21110, Jordan"}],"role":[{"vocabulary":"crossref","role":"author"}]},{"given":"Ayoub","family":"Alsarhan","sequence":"additional","affiliation":[{"name":"Department of Data Science and Artificial Intelligence, Faculty of Information Technology, Al-Ahliyya Amman University, Amman 19111, Jordan"},{"name":"Department of Information Technology, Faculty of Prince Al-Hussien bin Abdullah, The Hashemite University, Zarqa 13133, Jordan"}],"role":[{"vocabulary":"crossref","role":"author"}]},{"ORCID":"https:\/\/orcid.org\/0000-0002-0884-7885","authenticated-orcid":false,"given":"Sami Aziz","family":"Alshammari","sequence":"additional","affiliation":[{"name":"Department of Information Technology, Faculty of Computing and Information Technology, Northern Border University, Rafha 73213, Saudi Arabia"}],"role":[{"vocabulary":"crossref","role":"author"}]},{"ORCID":"https:\/\/orcid.org\/0000-0001-5739-0589","authenticated-orcid":false,"given":"Nayef H.","family":"Alshammari","sequence":"additional","affiliation":[{"name":"Department of Computer Science, Faculty of Computers and Information Technology, University of Tabuk, Tabuk 47512, Saudi Arabia"}],"role":[{"vocabulary":"crossref","role":"author"}]},{"ORCID":"https:\/\/orcid.org\/0000-0003-1570-8274","authenticated-orcid":false,"given":"Khalid Hamad","family":"Alnafisah","sequence":"additional","affiliation":[{"name":"Department of Computer Sciences, Faculty of Computing and Information Technology, Northern Border University, Rafha 73213, Saudi Arabia"}],"role":[{"vocabulary":"crossref","role":"author"}]},{"ORCID":"https:\/\/orcid.org\/0000-0003-2595-0611","authenticated-orcid":false,"given":"Mohammed Kamel","family":"Aleinzi","sequence":"additional","affiliation":[{"name":"Department of Information Systems, Faculty of Computing and Information Technology, Northern Border University, Rafha 73213, Saudi Arabia"}],"role":[{"vocabulary":"crossref","role":"author"}]}],"member":"1968","published-online":{"date-parts":[[2026,6,16]]},"reference":[{"key":"ref_1","doi-asserted-by":"crossref","unstructured":"Viradia, V., Jain, A., Ogety, S.S., and Donvir, A. 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