QuantumGuard: A Post-Quantum Resilient Deception-Driven Framework for Proactive Threat Hunting and Cognitive Honeynet Orchestration in 6G-Enabled Cyber-Physical Systems

Abstract

The convergence of 6G ultra-reliable low-latency communications, massive cyber-physical actuation, and the looming threat of cryptographically relevant quantum computers exposes a fundamentally new attack surface that is poorly addressed by reactive intrusion-detection paradigms. This study presents QuantumGuard, a proactive cybersecurity framework that inverts the conventional defender posture by integrating cognitive honeynets, post-quantum-secured intelligence channels, and reinforcement-learning-driven deception adaptation across 6G-enabled cyber-physical environments. The principal contribution is the architectural integration of four previously disjoint capabilities—a cognitive honeynet orchestrator, a reinforcement-learning deception policy engine operating under partial observability, a transformer-based MITRE ATT&CK attribution network, and a post-quantum federated intelligence bus se-cured with CRYSTALS-Kyber and CRYSTALS-Dilithium—into a single closed-loop control architecture for 6G cyber-physical systems. To assess feasibility, we report a preliminary evaluation on the CICAPT-IIoT-2024 and Edge-IIoTset benchmark datasets, complemented by a 320-endpoint 6G slice testbed configured, as described in Section IV. Initial results indicate an attacker engagement-retention rate of approximately 96.42 per cent, MITRE ATT&CK technique-attribution accuracy of approximately 91.8 per cent, a 78.6 per cent reduction in median attacker dwell time relative to passive honeypot baselines, and a deception-induced production-traffic overhead of 1.7 per cent. The PQ-FIB sustains a 14.2 ms median post-quantum handshake latency at slice scale. We position these numbers as preliminary evidence of operational viability under the evaluated threat model rather than as fully characterized performance bounds; a follow-up empirical study, planned for a separate publication, will extend the evaluation to deception-aware adversaries and sustained-attack stress conditions.