Cyber-physical control systems are critical infrastructures designed around highly responsive feedback loops that are measured and manipulated by hundreds of sensors and controllers. Anomalous data, such as from cyber-attacks, greatly risk the safety of the infrastructure and human operators. With recent advances in the quantum computing paradigm, the application of quantum in anomaly detection can greatly improve identification of cyber-attacks in physical sensor data. In this paper, we explore the use of strong pre-processing methods and a quantum-hybrid Support Vector Machine (SVM) that takes advantage of fidelity in parameterized quantum circuits to efficiently and effectively flatten extremely high dimensional data. Our results show an F-1 Score of 0.86 and accuracy of 87% on the HAI CPS dataset using an 8-qubit, 16-feature quantum kernel, performing equally to existing work and 14% better than its classical counterpart.
Cyber-physical control systems are critical infrastructures designed around highly responsive feedback loops that are measured and manipulated by hundreds of sensors and controllers. Anomalous data, such as from cyber-attacks, greatly risk the safety of the infrastructure and human operators. With recent advances in the quantum computing paradigm, the application of quantum in anomaly detection can greatly improve identification of cyber-attacks in physical sensor data. In this paper, we explore the use of strong pre-processing methods and a quantum-hybrid Support Vector Machine (SVM) that takes advantage of fidelity in parameterized quantum circuits to efficiently and effectively flatten extremely high dimensional data. Our results show an F-1 Score of 0.86 and accuracy of 87% on the HAI CPS dataset using an 8-qubit, 16-feature quantum kernel, performing equally to existing work and 14% better than its classical counterpart.
The growing complexity and velocity of cyber threats in high-security environments such as defense, critical infrastructure, and intelligence networks necessitates a paradigm shift in threat detection capabilities. Traditional cybersecurity systems, including those enhanced by classical machine learning algorithms, often struggle to process and classify massive volumes of heterogeneous and encrypted data in real time. This shortcoming is particularly evident in the context of advanced persistent threats (APTs), polymorphic malware, and insider attacks, which require rapid adaptation and heightened sensitivity to anomalous behavior.Quantum Machine Learning (QML), an emerging interdisciplinary field at the intersection of quantum computing and artificial intelligence, presents a promising avenue for augmenting threat detection mechanisms. Leveraging quantum phenomena such as superposition and entanglement, QML models offer potential advantages in processing speed, pattern recognition, and feature space transformation that can outperform their classical counterparts in high-dimensional data analysis. This paper explores the application of QML to threat detection in high-security networks, proposing a hybrid quantum-classical framework that integrates quantum-enhanced classifiers such as quantum support vector machines and variational quantum circuits into existing detection pipelines.The study outlines a technical overview of quantum computing principles relevant to cybersecurity, critically evaluates existing detection architectures, and presents simulation-based case studies to assess performance metrics, including detection accuracy and false positive rates. It further examines the limitations of current quantum hardware, algorithmic constraints, and emerging ethical and operational considerations. The findings suggest that while QML is still constrained by hardware maturity and integration complexity, it holds transformative potential for proactive, intelligent, and adaptive cyber defense systems in high-stakes environments. This research contributes to ongoing efforts to future-proof cybersecurity infrastructure against both classical and post-quantum threat landscapes.
This research explores the integration of quantum computing and machine learning for anomaly detection in critical infrastructure sensor networks. Anomaly detection is crucial for maintaining the reliability and security of these networks, where early detection of faults or intrusions can prevent catastrophic failures. Traditional machine learning methods often struggle with the high-dimensional and complex data generated by these systems. Hybrid quantum approaches, combining quantum algorithms with classical machine learning models, offer a promising solution by leveraging quantum computational advantages, such as quantum feature mapping and kernel methods. This paper investigates how these hybrid models can improve detection accuracy, reduce processing time, and handle large-scale data more efficiently. The potential of quantum machine learning for anomaly detection in critical infrastructure is discussed, along with the challenges posed by current quantum hardware limitations and future directions for research.
With cyber-attacks becoming increasingly sophisticated, modern network intrusion detection systems (NIDSs) are relying on machine learning (ML) methods for their flexibility in detecting subtle anomalous patterns in huge amounts of network data. However, classical ML methods such as support vector machines (SVMs) often rely on the conversion of low-dimensional data into a high-dimensional space, creating complex linear systems that are time-consuming to evaluate on large data inputs such as network flow logs. We propose addressing this limitation by employing a hybrid quantum-classical ML model to leverage quantum computing's (QC's) superiority in high-dimensional areas. We constructed a quantum kernel with an SVM model and evaluated it on four different network attacks from a modern intrusion detection dataset. Results reveal an average hardware accuracy rate of 85% with noticeably small deviations between runs, suggesting that quantum kernels may be a noise-resistant solution. We evaluated these results alongside classical and noiseless quantum simulator benchmarks.
The application and assessment of quantum-based anomaly detection models in cybersecurity are examined in this work. The efficacy of quantum machine learning approaches for detecting several cyber threats, including Denial of Service (DoS), Remote-to-Local (R2L), and botnet penetration, using two well-known intrusion detection datasets: NSL-KDD and CICIDS2017. Angle and amplitude encoding techniques are worn to preprocess and instruct traditional data into quantum-readable formats, making it compatible with quantum circuits. Due to the present constraints of Noisy Intermediate-Scale Quantum (NISQ) devices, the models are developed using Qiskit, using parameterized quantum layers via the TwoLocal ansatz, and simulated on classical hardware using Qiskit Aer. Metrics are used to compare performance to traditional machine learning models, such as Support Vector Machines (SVM), Random Forests (RF), and Multilayer Perceptions (MLP). The quantum SVM (QSVM) performs better in classification on both datasets, according to the results, indicating that quantum computing may be used to improve anomaly detection in cybersecurity applications.
Cyberbullying has become much more common due to the proliferation of social media, which has devastating effects on users' mental health and relationships. Automatic identification of abusive textual content has therefore become an important research problem. Cyberbullying detection has seen extensive use of classical machine learning approaches, notably Support Vector Machines (SVMs); however, their effectiveness can be limited when handling high-dimensional and context-rich textual features. Recent developments in quantum computing introduce new computational paradigms that may enable more expressive feature representations through quantum-enhanced learning models. In this study, we explore the potential of a hybrid. Nowadays classical-quantum architecture to apply a Quantum Support Vector Machine (QSVM) to detect cyberbullying. Experiments were performed on a publicly available Kaggle dataset containing 35,824 labeled tweets. Before TF-IDF feature extraction, the text data underwent preprocessing via cleaning and tokenization. Dimension reduction was carried out using Principal Component Analysis (PCA) in respect of qubit constraints. Then, they were embedded into quantum states using angle embedding. The accuracy, precision, recall, and F1-score measures were used to compare QSVM models with various qubit configurations (2, 4, and 6), as well as a traditional SVM baseline, under an 80-20 stratified train-test split. The findings indicate that the quality of QSVM performance is highest with the increase in qubit numbers and the maximum accuracy of the quantum computing method is 60 percent according to six qubits, whereas the classical SVM achieves 67.5 percent. Although the quantum model currently incurs higher computational overhead due to simulator-based implementation, increasing qubit dimensionality enhances its ability to capture complex and non-linear linguistic patterns. These observations indicate that QSVM-based cyberbullying detection remains exploratory at present, with scope for further improvement as quantum hardware and algorithms advance.
Quantum computing represents a promising frontier for machine learning, offering new tools to tackle complex problems by leveraging high-dimensional feature spaces and the unique properties of quantum systems. In this context, quantum kernels have emerged as a particularly compelling technique, capable of revealing structures in data that are difficult to detect using classical methods (Schuld and Killoran, 2019 [5]). However, their practical impact in real-world applications remains largely unexplored. This work proposes a hybrid quantum-classical architecture for anomaly detection in industrial cyber-physical systems, using the SWaT testbed as a case study. In complex environments like SWaT, sophisticated cyber-attacks can mimic normal system behavior, making them difficult to identify (Goh et al., 2016 [1]). Quantum kernels may help distinguish such anomalies by enabling more expressive data representations. Experimental results demonstrate the viability of hybrid quantum approaches, providing promising indications for future developments in quantum-supported industrial system security.