2.1CRJun 10
Bridging the Smart City Cybersecurity Data Gap Through AI-Driven Synthetic Dataset GenerationStephanie Polczynski, John D. Hastings, Varghese Vaidyan et al.
Smart cities rely on interconnected cyber-physical systems that integrate sensors, IoT devices, cloud platforms, and AI-driven services and decision-making. While these systems enhance city services, they also introduce complex cybersecurity challenges due to their large attack surfaces, heterogeneous data flows, and evolving threat vectors. Developing and validating cybersecurity tools for smart cities requires high-quality datasets that accurately represent real operational conditions. However, real-world datasets are often incomplete, contain privacy-sensitive data, are difficult to access, or lack sufficient malicious activity to support tool development. This research addresses this critical gap by proposing an AI-based synthetic data generation (SDG) framework designed specifically for smart city cybersecurity research. The proposed framework leverages generative artificial intelligence models to produce high-fidelity synthetic cybersecurity datasets that replicate realistic device behaviors, network interactions, and cyber-attack scenarios. The synthetic datasets are evaluated for conformity to protocol standards, statistical similarity to original datasets, and utility in common security tools. The resulting synthetic data generation framework and evaluation metrics are expected to advance smart city cybersecurity by enabling researchers to model threats more effectively and evaluate defensive techniques more comprehensively to better protect critical smart city infrastructures.
3.7QUANT-PHJun 10
Superspace Concentration and Adversarial Robustness in Quantum AlgorithmsEric Yocam, Christian Yocam, Varghese Vaidyan et al.
We study superspace concentration as a quantum resource, formalized through the focus measure F(\r{ho}) = λ_max(\r{ho}_super) - the largest eigenvalue of the reduced superspace state - which quantifies the capacity of a quantum system to concentrate informational weight into a preferred subspace of an extended degree-of-freedom space. We develop a complete resource-theoretic framework around this measure and validate its properties through GPU-accelerated numerical simulation. Analytic decoherence predictions are confirmed to machine precision (1.11 x 10^{-16}) for superspace dimensions dS in {2,4,8,16,32}. Focus monotonicity holds across 10,000 random states with zero violations under four focus-non-generating channels across six system configurations. Focused quantum states resist coherent unitary attacks with significantly greater resilience than standard fidelity predicts, with focus remaining above 0.9 at attack strength ε = 0.302 versus ε = 0.174 for fidelity. We further demonstrate that the focus measure and the U(dS)-asymmetry measure are operationally distinct: asymmetry remains near zero and provides no robustness signal under coherent and targeted attacks while focus tracks spectral concentration and remains robust until ε > 0.3. The connection between Grover's algorithm and superspace concentration is made explicit via the identity F(|ψ_k><ψ_k|) = P(marked), providing a resource-theoretic interpretation of oracle query complexity. Finally, we provide the first numerical characterization of the focus capacity gap ΔF, identifying a log_2(dS) scaling law confirmed for both product and correlated noise channels.