Recent advancements in quantum computing have led to the emergence of hybrid quantum neural networks, such as Quanvolutional Neural Networks (QuNNs), which integrate quantum and classical layers. While the susceptibility of classical neural networks to adversarial attacks is well-documented, the impact on QuNNs remains less understood. This study introduces RobQuNN, a new methodology to enhance the robustness of QuNNs against adversarial attacks, utilizing quantum circuit expressibility and entanglement capability alongside different adversarial strategies. Additionally, the study investigates the transferability of adversarial examples between classical and quantum models using RobQuNN, enhancing our understanding of cross-model vulnerabilities and pointing to new directions in quantum cybersecurity. The findings reveal that QuNNs exhibit up to 60% higher robustness compared to classical networks for the MNIST dataset, particularly at low levels of perturbation. This underscores the potential of quantum approaches in improving security defenses. In addition, RobQuNN revealed that QuNN does not exhibit enhanced resistance or susceptibility to cross-model adversarial examples regardless of the quantum circuit architecture.
Recent advancements in quantum computing have led to the emergence of hybrid quantum neural networks, such as Quanvolutional Neural Networks (QuNNs), which integrate quantum and classical layers. While the susceptibility of classical neural networks to adversarial attacks is well-documented, the impact on QuNNs remains less understood. This study introduces RobQuNN, a new methodology to enhance the robustness of QuNNs against adversarial attacks, utilizing quantum circuit expressibility and entanglement capability alongside different adversarial strategies. Additionally, the study investigates the transferability of adversarial examples between classical and quantum models using RobQuNN, enhancing our understanding of cross-model vulnerabilities and pointing to new directions in quantum cybersecurity. The findings reveal that QuNNs exhibit up to 60% higher robustness compared to classical networks for the MNIST dataset, particularly at low levels of perturbation. This underscores the potential of quantum approaches in improving security defenses. In addition, RobQuNN revealed that QuNN does not exhibit enhanced resistance or susceptibility to cross-model adversarial examples regardless of the quantum circuit architecture.
Recent advancements in quantum computing have led to the development of hybrid quantum neural networks (HQNNs) that employ a mixed set of quantum layers and classical layers, such as Quanvolutional Neural Networks (QuNNs). While several works have shown security threats of classical neural networks, such as adversarial attacks, their impact on QuNNs is still relatively unexplored. This work tackles this problem by designing AdvQuNN, a specialized methodology to investigate the robustness of HQNNs like QuNNs against adversarial attacks. It employs different types of Ansatzes as parametrized quantum circuits and different types of adversarial attacks. This study aims to rigorously assess the influence of quantum circuit architecture on the resilience of QuNN models, which opens up new pathways for enhancing the robustness of QuNNs and advancing the field of quantum cybersecurity. Our results show that, compared to classical convolutional networks, QuNNs achieve up to 60% higher robustness for the MNIST and 40% for FMNIST datasets.
With the rapid advancement of artificial intelligence (AI) and quantum computing, cybersecurity threats have evolved, giving rise to adversarial quantum attacks. These attacks exploit the vulnerabilities of AI models using quantum algorithms, posing a significant risk to data security, model robustness, and decision-making systems. This paper presents a comprehensive review of adversarial quantum attacks on AI, analyzing their mechanisms, potential impacts, and countermeasures. It explores how quantum computing can enhance adversarial attacks by accelerating the generation of adversarial examples, breaking cryptographic protections, and undermining AI model integrity. Additionally, the study examines different attack vectors, including quantum-enhanced adversarial perturbations, quantum machine learning (QML) vulnerabilities, and quantum decryption threats. The paper also discusses defensive strategies such as quantum-resistant AI models, quantum cryptographic defenses, and hybrid quantum-classical security frameworks that can mitigate these risks. By evaluating existing research and emerging trends, this review provides insights into the growing intersection of AI security and quantum computing. The findings emphasize the urgent need for robust quantum-aware AI security frameworks to safeguard AI-driven systems in the quantum era. Future research directions include developing quantum-adaptive AI models, post-quantum cryptographic techniques, and real-world applications of quantum-safe AI architectures. This review aims to contribute to the ongoing discourse on ensuring AI resilience against adversarial quantum threats, paving the way for a secure and quantum-resistant future.
Deep neural networks remain highly vulnerable to adversarial perturbations, limiting their reliability in security- and safety-critical applications. To address this challenge, we introduce QShield, a modular hybrid quantum-classical neural network (HQCNN) architecture designed to enhance the adversarial robustness of classical deep learning models. QShield integrates a conventional convolutional neural network (CNN) backbone for feature extraction with a quantum processing module that encodes the extracted features into quantum states, applies structured entanglement operations under realistic noise models, and outputs a hybrid prediction through a dynamically weighted fusion mechanism implemented via a lightweight multilayer perceptron (MLP). We systematically evaluate both classical and hybrid quantum-classical models on the MNIST, OrganAMNIST, and CIFAR-10 datasets, using a comprehensive set of robustness, efficiency, and computational performance metrics. Our results demonstrate that classical models are highly vulnerable to adversarial attacks, whereas the proposed hybrid models with entanglement patterns maintain high predictive accuracy while substantially reducing attack success rates across a wide range of adversarial attacks. Furthermore, the proposed hybrid architecture significantly increased the computational cost required to generate adversarial examples, thereby introducing an additional layer of defense. These findings indicate that the proposed modular hybrid architecture achieves a practical balance between predictive accuracy and adversarial robustness, positioning it as a promising approach for secure and reliable machine learning in sensitive and safety-critical applications.
Machine learning can thrust technological advances and benefit different application areas. Further, with the rise of quantum computing, machine learning algorithms have begun to be implemented in a quantum environment; this is now referred to as quantum machine learning. There are several attempts to implement deep learning in quantum computers. Nevertheless, they were not entirely successful. Then, a convolutional neural network (CNN) combined with an additional quanvolutional layer was discovered and called a quanvolutional neural network (QNN). A QNN has shown a higher performance over a classical CNN. As a result, QNNs could achieve better accuracy and loss values than the classical ones and show their robustness against adversarial examples generated from their classical versions. This work aims to evaluate the accuracy, loss values, and adversarial robustness of QNNs compared to CNNs.
Quantum machine learning, noted for its remarkable advancements in enhancing computational speed and augmenting data processing efficacy, is acquiring considerable recognition within the scientific community. Despite the noteworthy advancements of quantum machine learning, it shares with its traditional counterpart a susceptibility to adversarial threats. This presents a significant challenge and underscores the need for robust countermeasures in this emerging field of study. Developing effective adversarial attack algorithms, such as the Quantum Fast Gradient Sign Method (QFGSM), is crucial to opening the path for exploring robust defense mechanisms against these threats. However, unlike traditional machine learning, the quantum field currently lacks the effective techniques to orchestrate adversarial attacks. This study introduces and assesses the QFGSM, a adversarial attack algorithm tailored for QNNs. Additionally, we evaluate the effect of random noise and its quantum version on these models, providing a comprehensive comparison to understand the efficacy of adversarial attack methods. The evaluation is conducted on both traditional Neural Networks (NNs) and QNNs using the ClaMP dataset, a cybersecurity-focused dataset, and involves performance metrics like Accuracy, Precision, Recall, and F1 score. Our findings underscore the differential resilience of NNs and QNNs under adversarial attacks and reveal the contrasting effects of FGSM, QFGSM, and random noise-based methods. Our study reveals that Quantum Neural Networks (QNNs) show significant vulnerability to our proposed Quantum Fast Gradient Sign Method (QFGSM) compared to random noise, indicating a need for quantum-specific defenses in the face of this advanced adversarial attack algorithm.
Machine learning (ML) methods such as artificial neural networks are rapidly becoming ubiquitous in modern science, technology, and industry. Despite their accuracy and sophistication, neural networks can be easily fooled by carefully designed malicious inputs known as adversarial attacks. While such vulnerabilities remain a serious challenge for classical neural networks, the extent of their existence is not fully understood in the quantum ML setting. In this paper, we benchmark the robustness of quantum ML networks, such as quantum variational classifiers (QVC), at scale by performing rigorous training for both simple and complex image datasets and through a variety of high-end adversarial attacks. Our results show that QVCs offer a notably enhanced robustness against classical adversarial attacks by learning features, which are not detected by the classical neural networks, indicating a possible quantum advantage for ML tasks. Contrarily, and remarkably, the converse is not true, with attacks on quantum networks also capable of deceiving classical neural networks. By combining quantum and classical network outcomes, we propose an adversarial attack detection technology. Traditionally quantum advantage in ML systems has been sought through increased accuracy or algorithmic speed-up, but our study has revealed the potential for a kind of quantum advantage through superior robustness of ML models, whose practical realization will address serious security concerns and reliability issues of ML algorithms employed in a myriad of applications including autonomous vehicles, cybersecurity, and surveillance robotic systems.