Security as a Natural Law: A Quantum-Inspired Hypothesis for Information Persistence

Area of Science:

• Cybersecurity
• Information Theory
• Quantum-Inspired Computing

Background:

• Current cybersecurity frameworks often lack a unified, quantifiable approach to comparing architectural efficiency.
• Understanding the energetic and temporal costs associated with security controls is crucial for optimizing defense strategies.
• A novel perspective is needed to model the dynamic nature of cybersecurity under constraints like entropy and latency.

Purpose of the Study:

• To propose a quantum-inspired hypothesis modeling cybersecurity as information persistence.
• To develop a time- and energy-aware framework for comparing security architectures.
• To introduce a dimensionless Security Persistence Index (P) and evaluate a novel Principle of Energetic Asymmetry.

Main Methods:

• Defined a Security Persistence Index: P=Δ/(E+L+S), where Δ represents system separation, and E, L, S are energy, latency, and entropy costs.
• Mapped security controls across three temporal phases (Intent, React, Resolve) within a 5x3 Control Lattice.
• Simulated four distinct architectures (Intent-heavy, Balanced, Misaligned, React-heavy) over 1000 trials each.

Main Results:

• The Principle of Energetic Asymmetry was supported: React-dominated architectures incurred higher costs.
• Intent-heavy architectures achieved the highest simulated persistence (Psim=5.93) compared to React-heavy (Psim=3.45).
• Intent-heavy designs demonstrated lower normalized energy cost, CPU load, false positives, latency, and residual entropy.

Conclusions:

• The proposed quantum-inspired framework provides simulation-based evidence for the efficacy of Intent-heavy security architectures.
• The Security Persistence Index offers a novel metric for evaluating and comparing cybersecurity designs.
• Further validation through hardware-level measurements, independent replication, and field studies is required.