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.
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.
Quantum Machine Learning (QML) fuses quantum computing with machine learning to address complex tasks with potential speedups over classical methods. While QML models such as variational quantum classifiers (QVC), quantum multilayer perceptron(QMLP) models and quantum convolutional neural networks (QCNN) have demonstrated promise in applications like image recognition and malware classification, they remain vulnerable to adversarial threats. Inspired by the vulnerabilities in classical ML, this work systematically investigates how attacks-ranging from training-time poisoning and inferencetime evasion (e.g., quantum versions of FGSM and PGD) to deployment-time trigger attacks-manifest in quantum circuits. We explore how classical adversarial strategies adapt to quantum models through parameterized encodings, hybrid architectures, and probabilistic outputs. The poster evaluates different quantum classifiers under adversarial settings, comparing their robustness, trainability, and resilience to perturbations. Defense mechanisms such as randomized encoding, engineered noise channels, and quantum adversarial training are analyzed in relation to specific threat types. In addition, we assess how quantum models behave differently than classical counterparts under attack, and how quantum-specific design constraints can either exacerbate or mitigate these effects. Our ultimate goal is to define and construct robust QML systems that are both theoretically sound and practically secure. By synthesizing results across multiple QML architectures and threat models, this work provides actionable insight into the development of resilient quantum classifiers, paving the way toward trustworthy and scalable quantum machine learning.
Abstract The rapid advancements in machine learning and quantum computing have given rise to a new research frontier: quantum machine learning. Quantum models designed for tackling classification problems possess the potential to deliver speed enhancements and superior predictive accuracy compared to their classical counterparts. However, recent research has revealed that quantum neural networks (QNNs), akin to their classical deep neural network-based classifier counterparts, are vulnerable to adversarial attacks. In these attacks, meticulously designed perturbations added to clean input data can result in QNNs producing incorrect predictions with high confidence. To mitigate this issue, we suggest enhancing the adversarial robustness of quantum machine learning systems by incorporating noise layers into QNNs. This is accomplished by solving a Min-Max optimization problem to control the magnitude of the noise, thereby increasing the QNN’s resilience against adversarial attacks. Extensive numerical experiments illustrate that our proposed method outperforms state-of-the-art defense techniques in terms of both clean and robust accuracy.
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.
Adversarial attack aims to generate infinitesimal perturbations that are crafted to deceive well-trained classifiers, and has been extensively explored in the context of classical data. However, the generation of adversarial attacks for quantum data remains largely unexplored. This work addresses this gap by investigating the efficacy of classical adversarial attack generation methods in the realm of quantum data learning. Specifically, we implement two widely recognized adversarial attack generation techniques, namely, the fast gradient sign method (FGSM) and the Deepfool method, for generating adversarial attacks on quantum data based on Gell-Mann matrices. We further evaluate the deceptive capabilities of these generated adversarial samples on a classical classifier tasked with entanglement discrimination. Through extensive numerical simulations, we demonstrate the effectiveness of our adversarial attack generation methods in efficiently crafting adversarial attacks on quantum data, successfully fooling the well-trained classifier. The outcomes of our research not only extend the applicability of classical machine learning algorithms to the domain of quantum machine learning but also provide valuable insights into the vulnerability of quantum data.
In cybersecurity, protecting sensitive data from malicious attacks is of paramount importance. Classical machine learning algorithms have shown limitations in this domain due to their inability to handle complex, highly dynamic, and adversarial attack scenarios. Quantum machine learning (QML) algorithms, with their enhanced processing capacity and robustness against such attacks, offer a promising alternative to address these shortcomings. Consequently, QML can significantly improve the detection and mitigation of sophisticated and evolving threats. This study explores the application of QML algorithms, specifically the quantum support vector machine (QSVM) and a hybrid quantum neural network (QNN) and QSVM architecture (QSVM-QNN), on two real-world cybersecurity datasets: APA-DDoS and CIC-IoT2022. Initially, different qubit counts and encoding techniques are investigated to assess the effectiveness of the swap test and UU† methods for inner product calculation, which is later employed in the QSVM algorithm. Subsequently, the performance of the proposed QSVM and QSVM-QNN models is evaluated and compared against classical counterparts across varying numbers of qubits and encoding schemes. The results show that the proposed QSVM model achieved accuracies of 1.000 and 0.985, while the QSVM-QNN model reached accuracies of 0.970 and 1.000, respectively, on the two datasets, demonstrating strong performance and surpassing several classical models. Furthermore, to assess robustness, the proposed algorithms were tested under various noise models, highlighting their capability to provide effective solutions for cybersecurity challenges in realistic quantum noisy environments.
Quantum machine learning (QML) is emerging as a promising paradigm at the intersection of quantum computing and artificial intelligence, yet its security under adversarial conditions remains insufficiently understood. This scoping review aims to systematically map empirical research on adversarial robustness in QML and to identify dominant threat models, defense strategies, evaluation approaches, practical constraints, and future research directions. Following PRISMA-ScR guidelines, four major databases were searched, resulting in 53 eligible empirical studies published between 2020 and 2026. The findings show that most research concentrates on input-level evasion attacks, particularly adversarial examples, and primarily evaluates robustness in classification-oriented models such as variational quantum circuits and quantum neural networks. Defense strategies are largely adapted from classical adversarial training and noise-based mitigation, with limited deployment on real quantum hardware. Robustness assessment is predominantly empirical, relying on accuracy degradation and attack success rate, while formal certification methods remain less common. The literature also highlights substantial constraints related to hardware limitations, NISQ noise, computational cost, and dataset scale. Overall, the evidence indicates that adversarial robustness research in QML is expanding but remains methodologically concentrated, underscoring the need for standardized benchmarking, scalable defenses, and hardware-validated robustness evaluation frameworks.