English

Quantum Key Distribution Secured Federated Learning for Channel Estimation and Radar Spectrum Sensing in 6G Networks

Cryptography and Security 2026-03-18 v1 Information Theory Machine Learning math.IT

Abstract

This paper presents a federated learning framework secured by quantum key distribution (QKD) for wireless channel estimation and radar spectrum sensing in the next generation networks (NextG or Beyond 6G). A BB84-style protocol abstraction and pairwise additive masking are utilized to train clients' local models (CNN for channel estimation, U-Net for radar segmentation) and upload only masked model updates. The server aggregates without observing plain parameters; an eavesdropper without QKD keys cannot recover individual updates. Experiments show that secure FL achieves NMSE of 0.216 for channel estimation and 92.1\% accuracy with 0.72 mIoU for radar sensing. When an eavesdropper is present, QBER rises to \sim25\% and all rounds abort as intended; reconstruction error remains below 10510^{-5}, confirming correct aggregation.

Keywords

Cite

@article{arxiv.2603.15649,
  title  = {Quantum Key Distribution Secured Federated Learning for Channel Estimation and Radar Spectrum Sensing in 6G Networks},
  author = {Ferhat Ozgur Catak and Murat Kuzlu and Jungwon Seo and Umit Cali},
  journal= {arXiv preprint arXiv:2603.15649},
  year   = {2026}
}

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10 pages