A tertiary review on quantum cryptography

TL;DR

This paper reviews the current state of quantum cryptography, highlighting its techniques, challenges, and future directions, with a focus on quantum key distribution and implementation issues.

Contribution

It provides a comprehensive bibliometric analysis of 51 studies, identifying main techniques, challenges, and future research directions in quantum cryptography.

Findings

Quantum key distribution is the most prevalent technique.

Major challenges include implementation cost and error correction.

The field faces issues like decoherence and quantum hacking.

Abstract

Quantum computers impose an immense threat to system security. As a countermeasure, new cryptographic classes have been created to prevent these attacks. Technologies such as post-quantum cryptography and quantum cryptography. Quantum cryptography uses the principle of quantum physics to produce theoretically unbreakable security. This tertiary review selected 51 secondary studies from the Scopus database and presented bibliometric analysis, a list of the main techniques used in the field, and existing open challenges and future directions in quantum cryptography research. The results showed a prevalence of QKD over other techniques among the selected papers and stated that the field still faces many problems related to implementation cost, error correction, decoherence, key rates, communication distance, and quantum hacking.