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Paper 1

Dyadic-Chaotic Lifting S-Boxes for Enhanced Physical-Layer Security within 6G Networks

Ilias Cherkaoui, Indrakshi Dey

Year
2025
Journal
arXiv preprint
DOI
arXiv:2511.12325
arXiv
2511.12325

Sixth-Generation (6G) wireless networks will interconnect billions of resource-constrained devices and time-critical services, where classical, fixed, and heavy cryptography strains latency and energy budgets and struggles against large-scale, pre-computation attacks. Physical-Layer Security (PLS) is therefore pivotal to deliver lightweight, information-theoretic protection, but still requires strong, reconfigurable confusion components that can be diversified per slice, session, or device to blunt large-scale precomputation and side-channel attacks. In order to address the above requirement, we introduce the first-ever chaos-lifted substitution box (S-box) for PLS that couples a $β$-transformation-driven dynamical system with dyadic conditional sampling to generate time-varying, seedable 8-bit permutations on demand. This construction preserves uniformity via ergodicity, yields full 8-bit bijections, and supports on-the-fly diversification across sessions. The resulting S-box attains optimal algebraic degree 7 on every output bit and high average nonlinearity 102.5 (85% of the 8-bit bound), strengthening resistance to algebraic and linear cryptanalysis. Differential and linear profiling report max DDT entry 10 (probability 0.039) and max linear probability 0.648, motivating deployment within a multi-round cipher with a strong diffusion layer, where the security-to-efficiency trade-off is compelling. Our proposed reconfigurable, lightweight S-box directly fulfills key PLS requirements of 6G networks by delivering fast, hardware-amenable confusion components with built-in agility against evolving threats.

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Paper 2

The quantum smooth label cover problem is undecidable

Eric Culf, Kieran Mastel, Connor Paddock, Taro Spirig

Year
2025
Journal
arXiv preprint
DOI
arXiv:2510.03477
arXiv
2510.03477

We show that the quantum smooth label cover problem is undecidable and RE-hard. This sharply contrasts the quantum unique label cover problem, which can be decided efficiently by a result of Kempe, Regev, and Toner (FOCS'08). On the other hand, our result aligns with the RE-hardness of the quantum label cover problem, which follows from the celebrated MIP* = RE result of Ji, Natarajan, Vidick, Wright, and Yuen (ACM'21). Additionally, we show that the quantum oracularized smooth label cover problem is RE-hard. Our second result fits with the alternative quantum unique games conjecture recently proposed by Mousavi and Spirig (ITCS'25) on the RE-hardness of the quantum oracularized unique label cover problem. Our proof techniques include a quantum version of Feige's reduction from 3SAT to 3SAT5 (STOC'96) for BCSMIP*-protocols, which may be of independent interest.

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