Quantum safe drone security: Authenticated key exchange and privacy preserving intrusion detection for low altitude intelligent transportation systems

Low altitude intelligent transportation systems (LITS) coordinate Autonomous Aerial Vehicles (AAVs) across shared airspace, but their wireless drone to ground links remain exposed to Global Positioning System (GPS) spoofing, radio frequency (RF) jamming, command injection, and future quantum attacks. Existing Internet of Drones authentication schemes usually rely on elliptic curve or symmetric primitives, while National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST) transition guidance targets deprecation of quantum vulnerable public key mechanisms beginning after 2030, they also rarely connect authentication with privacy aware intrusion detection. We propose Post Quantum Low Altitude Intelligent Transportation Security (PQ-LITS), a multi layer framework that combines post quantum mutual authentication with federated telemetry anomaly detection. The authentication layer uses the Module Lattice Based Key Encapsulation Mechanism (ML-KEM-768, Federal Information Processing Standards (FIPS) 203) and the Module Lattice Based Digital Signature Algorithm (ML-DSA-65, FIPS 204) to establish a session key in three messages, with 0.82 milliseconds (ms) latency over 1000 runs. The detection layer trains autoencoders across three ground control stations with non independent and identically distributed (non IID) attacks using Federated Averaging (FedAvg) and Gaussian differential privacy (σ = 0.01). On 15,000 synthetic telemetry records, PQ-LITS reaches F1 0.7549, 95.7% of the centralised upper bound, while reducing communication by 58.2%. We give a security proof in the Quantum Random Oracle Model, reducing session security to Module Learning With Errors (Module LWE) and Module Short Integer Solution (Module SIS), and release the dataset, code, and benchmarks.