Advanced Encryption Techniques in Satellite Communications With Chaotic Injection and Quantum Collapse for Enhanced Security

ABSTRACT Satellite communication systems are important in global information exchange in areas such as military security, weather forecasting, and telecommunications. Advanced encryption standard (AES) is widely used in satellite communication due to its robustness and efficiency. However, conventional AES implementations focus primarily on encryption and decryption, which require further improvements in attack resilience, particularly against adversaries that use machine learning–based cryptanalysis and quantum threats. This paper examines the use of AES algorithms to protect data transmission over satellite communications. It introduces novel modifications to AES, incorporating machine unlearning as a defensive mechanism against attacks, chaotic injection for enhanced key unpredictability, and a quantum‐inspired approach based on wavefunction collapse to mislead attackers. Machine unlearning dynamically alters cryptographic states upon intrusion detection, preventing key recovery. Chaotic injection is explored in the S‐Box and key scheduling process to introduce controlled unpredictability without compromising reversibility. Additionally, a quantum circuit representation of AES is proposed, where an adversarial attack induces a wavefunction collapse, leading to incorrect but deterministic outputs. Performance evaluation under additive white Gaussian noise (AWGN) conditions demonstrates that the proposed AES achieves an average encryption throughput of 194 Mbps with only 3.2% additional computational overhead, whereas entropy analysis shows 7.85–7.92 bits/byte, with an improvement of 1.08% over standard AES and expanding the effective key space by approximately 6.6 times. Comparative security testing shows a 25% increase in resistance to differential attacks. Empirical machine learning attacks demonstrate a drop in classifier accuracy from approximately 92.3% for the baseline AES to 55.5% for the proposed scheme. These results confirm that the proposed modifications significantly strengthen AES while maintaining computational efficiency for real‐world satellite communication scenarios.