Quantum Inspired Cryptographic Framework for Secure Federated Learning and Data Integrity in Large Scale IoT Ecosystems

The rapid expansion of IoT ecosystems has increased concerns regarding data privacy, security, and model integrity, particularly in environments vulnerable to sophisticated adversarial and quantum-enabled attacks. Traditional cryptographic and Federated Learning (FL) methods cannot keep up with the demands for confidentiality and robustness in vast, diverse networks. Therefore, this study presents a Quantum-Inspired Cryptographic Framework that uses Quantum Neural Networks, Post-Quantum Cryptography, and secure Federated Learning to enhance intrusion detection systems and provide quantum resilient communication. The methodology uses the UNSW-NB15 dataset, which has been cleaned, encoded, and normalized with reduced features balanced by SMOTE before splitting into 70 percent training and 30 percent testing. A QNN-based FL model can then be trained while Kyber-512 and NTRUEncrypt secure all updates to the model, as well as node communications, against both classical and quantum threats. The experimental results show that the proposed model significantly outperforms classical FL frameworks, achieving an accuracy of 98.1%, precision of 97.5%, recall of 97.9%, and F1-score of 97.7%, even under very challenging adversarial conditions. QICF is therefore a robust, privacy-preserving, and attack-resilient solution for next-generation large-scale IoT networks.