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arXiv:2606.09469

Hardware-Aware QAOA for Honeypot Traffic Partitioning on 100+ Qubit IBM Quantum Processors

Cameron V. Cogburn, Casimer DeCusatis, Evan Spillane

quant-phcs.CRSubmitted Jun 8, 2026• Announced Jun 9, 2026• 0 citations
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Abstract

Denial-of-service (DoS) and distributed denial-of-service (DDoS) mitigation requires separating malicious traffic from benign traffic while minimizing disruption to legitimate users. Prior work proposed mapping honeypot traffic partitioning to a weighted MaxCut problem and solving the resulting graphs with variational quantum algorithms. We extend this proof of principle direction with a reproducible event-level honeypot-to-QUBO pipeline, labeled temporal bipartite benchmark graphs with 16, 32, 66, and 110 event nodes, QAOA executions on IBM quantum hardware, classical heuristic baselines, a noiseless matrix product state reference, and a routing overhead analysis across quantum processor architectures. The largest benchmark is a 110-node, 181-edge instance executed on three IBM backends. Our results show that a shallow QAOA can execute real traffic partitioning workloads at the utility scale, while backend architecture and routing overhead affect objective quality, security metrics, and observed runtime. Because simple classical heuristics can solve the current labeled benchmark graphs, these experiments are not a quantum advantage claim. Instead, we deliberately use a fixed, shallow QAOA implementation to enable controlled comparisons across problem sizes and hardware architectures. This work establishes a hardware feasibility and architecture benchmark framework, and demonstrates that MaxCut cost, security quality, routing overhead, and runtime must be reported as separate metrics for cybersecurity relevant quantum optimization.

Comments
11 pages, 9 figures, 7 tables

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This study presents a rigorous empirical evaluation of the Quantum Approximate Optimization Algorithm (QAOA) within a hybrid quantum-classical framework for solving the NP-hard Max-Cut problem. Using Python and Qiskit Aer statevector simulations, we benchmark QAOA (depths p = 2 and p = 3) against established classical algorithms, including simulated annealing, the Goemans–Williamson algorithm, and greedy heuristics, across Erdős–Rényi and regular graphs with 4 to 20 nodes (100 instances per size). Results demonstrate that low-depth QAOA suffers from significant performance degradation, achieving a 0.467 approximation ratio at 20 nodes compared to 0.856 for Goemans–Williamson, alongside a 210× runtime overhead. Convergence analysis further reveals low optimality probabilities and high iteration costs, highlighting limitations of variational optimization in NISQ-era devices. This work provides a reproducible benchmarking framework and contributes to a realistic assessment of near-term quantum advantage.
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