<p>Energy Efficiency Performance Comparison.</p>

Current orchestration frameworks lack comprehensive quantum-resistant security mechanisms and fail to provide adaptive trust management suitable for dynamic 6G environments. This paper presents QShield-ZTN, a novel quantum-resilient, standards-compliant secure orchestration model designed specifically for autonomous 6G zero-touch networks.

The proposed framework integrates hybrid post-quantum cryptographic algorithms, dynamic zero-trust policy enforcement, and an AI-driven multi-agent orchestration engine to ensure robust security in quantum-threat environments. Extensive experimental evaluations conducted using four heterogeneous datasets (NSL-KDD + , CICIDS2017 + , QShield-Synthetic, and Quantum-Dataset) demonstrate significant performance gains over ten state-of-the-art frameworks.