Phishing remains a major cybersecurity threat, yet the application of quantum machine learning (QML) to phishing detection is still at an early stage. This study presents a systematic literature review aimed at providing a concise overview of existing QML-based approaches for phishing detection, identifying methodological trends, limitations, and future research directions. A PRISMA-guided review protocol was applied to peer-reviewed journal and conference articles published between 2021 and 2025, retrieved from major scientific databases. Eligible studies were analyzed in terms of QML models, feature encoding strategies, experimental settings, evaluation metrics, and study quality using an adapted Newcastle–Ottawa Scale. The results indicate that current research is limited in volume and largely focuses on hybrid quantum–classical models, particularly quantum support vector machines and variational quantum classifiers. Reported performance is highly dependent on encoding methods, circuit depth, and simulator-based experimentation, with few studies evaluating real quantum hardware. Common challenges include small datasets, lack of external validation, hardware noise, scalability constraints, and the absence of standardized benchmarks. Overall, the review suggests that QML for phishing detection remains exploratory and is not yet competitive with mature classical approaches, but it holds potential as an experimental research direction, provided that future studies address robustness, reproducibility, and practical deployment constraints.
Phishing remains a major cybersecurity threat, yet the application of quantum machine learning (QML) to phishing detection is still at an early stage. This study presents a systematic literature review aimed at providing a concise overview of existing QML-based approaches for phishing detection, identifying methodological trends, limitations, and future research directions. A PRISMA-guided review protocol was applied to peer-reviewed journal and conference articles published between 2021 and 2025, retrieved from major scientific databases. Eligible studies were analyzed in terms of QML models, feature encoding strategies, experimental settings, evaluation metrics, and study quality using an adapted Newcastle–Ottawa Scale. The results indicate that current research is limited in volume and largely focuses on hybrid quantum–classical models, particularly quantum support vector machines and variational quantum classifiers. Reported performance is highly dependent on encoding methods, circuit depth, and simulator-based experimentation, with few studies evaluating real quantum hardware. Common challenges include small datasets, lack of external validation, hardware noise, scalability constraints, and the absence of standardized benchmarks. Overall, the review suggests that QML for phishing detection remains exploratory and is not yet competitive with mature classical approaches, but it holds potential as an experimental research direction, provided that future studies address robustness, reproducibility, and practical deployment constraints.
A systematic review of Quantum Machine Learning techniques for phishing detection, synthesizing existing studies to extract methodological patterns and design principles rather than benchmark performance. The review examines QML paradigms, feature encoding strategies, and the impact of Noisy Intermediate-Scale Quantum constraints on learning behavior and feasibility. It highlights fragmentation, scalability limits, and limited practical gains over classical methods, and outlines research directions toward more robust, theoretically grounded, and application relevant quantum approaches for cybersecurity.
Emerging cyber threats demand novel detection and analysis paradigms that classical machine learning approaches are increasingly unable to address at requisite scale and speed. Quantum Machine Learning (QML), leveraging quantum mechanical phenomena such as superposition and entanglement, has emerged as a promising framework for cyber threat intelligence (CTI). This scoping review systematically examines 24 published works from 2020 to 2025 following the PRISMA-ScR protocol. We classify QML frameworks like Quantum Support Vector Machines (QSVM), Quantum Neural Networks (QNN), Variational Quantum Circuits (VQC), and Quantum Convolutional Neural Networks (QCNN) across four primary CTI domains: intrusion detection, malware classification, anomaly detection, and phishing detection. Results show that QML models achieved up to 98% accuracy in intrusion detection and 97% in IoT anomaly detection on curated benchmark datasets. Critical caveats apply: 83.3% of studies relied exclusively on quantum simulators rather than real hardware, most benchmarks used datasets predating 2017, and the classical pre-processing and post-processing overheads in hybrid architectures substantially qualify reported speedup claims. We assess hardware constraints in Noisy Intermediate-Scale Quantum (NISQ) devices, data encoding bottlenecks, and missing quality benchmarks. NIST post-quantum cryptography standards (FIPS 203-205, August 2024) and IBM quantum hardware milestones are discussed as contextual anchors. A structured research agenda concludes the review.
Quantum Machine Learning (QML) has become an important research area in recent years due to its potential to overcome the computational bottlenecks faced by classical machine learning methods. In this study, only SCI/SCI-Expanded journal articles published between 2023 and 2025 and accepted as early access for 2026 are considered, and 30 such articles are systematically examined to provide a comprehensive assessment of the current state of QML methods. The reviewed literature covers variational quantum circuits, quantum kernel methods, hybrid quantum–classical models, quantum annealing approaches, federated QML architectures, data encoding strategies, and adversarial robustness analyses. The findings indicate that QML models can exhibit stronger representational capacity and higher generalization performance compared to classical methods, particularly on high-dimensional, noisy, or small sample datasets. Reported results in domains such as healthcare, chemistry, energy systems, cybersecurity, blockchain, and finance reveal the diversity of QML applications and its interdisciplinary potential. Nevertheless, the limited qubit capacity of current NISQ hardware, constraints on circuit depth, and noise-related issues remain fundamental factors that restrict the scalability of QML models. This study synthesizes methodological trends, identifies open research problems, and proposes a directional roadmap for future QML research focused on hardware-aware circuit design, efficient data encoding schemes, and robust learning frameworks.
Quantum computing is progressing rapidly, which brings both new opportunities and significant cybersecurity risks. This matter is particularly crucial since traditional cryptographic systems will be vulnerable to attacks in the quantum era. At the same time, quantum machine learning (QML) is becoming a promising way to improve threat detection, anomaly analysis, and secure communication using quantum-inspired and hybrid learning methods. This paper aims to review essential QML algorithms, including Quantum Support Vector Machines (QSVM), Variational Quantum Circuits (VQC), Quantum Neural Networks (QNN), and Quantum Reinforcement Learning (QRL), while evaluating their prospective contributions to enhancing cybersecurity frameworks. We summarize recent simulation-based and early-stage experimental work, highlight their reported performance on benchmark datasets, and analyze major limitations related to hardware noise, data encoding bottlenecks, and scalability. The review also discusses unresolved issues and potential avenues for future research that could integrate quantum-safe and quantum-enhanced methods. The results indicate that, although the technology is still in its exploratory stage, QML has significant potential to enhance the creation of intelligent, resilient, and quantum-safe cybersecurity ecosystems.
Quantum Machine Learning (QML) has emerged as a promising interdisciplinary paradigm that integrates quantum computing and machine learning to address limitations of classical approaches in processing complex high-dimensional heterogeneous and imbalanced medical data. This study presents a systematic literature review of QML applications in healthcare based on 94 primary studies published between 2020 and April 2025. The review follows Kitchenham’s guidelines and the PRISMA framework to ensure rigor transparency and reproducibility. Seven research questions were formulated to examine publication trends sources datasets topics quantum model categories algorithms methods and evaluation metrics. Findings reveal a sharp increase in publication activity after 2023 indicating growing academic interest in healthcare-oriented QML. Medical imaging datasets were most frequently used followed by signal-based and tabular datasets with 86.5% of studies relying on public data. Hybrid classical-quantum approaches including CNN-QSVM Quantum Neural Networks and Variational Quantum Classifiers were dominant because they combine classical feature extraction with quantum-enhanced learning. However most studies were conducted in simulation environments rather than real hardware reflecting NISQ limitations including noise decoherence limited qubits and circuit depth constraints. Many results used small curated or imbalanced datasets raising concerns regarding generalizability reproducibility and clinical validity. Although numerous studies reported high accuracy standardized evaluation protocols external validation and uncertainty assessment remain limited. Overall QML in healthcare remains exploratory with substantial potential but significant barriers. This review highlights progress gaps and future directions emphasizing clinically representative datasets robust benchmarking interpretable noise-resilient models and real-hardware implementation to support trustworthy deployment in healthcare systems worldwide settings today.
Quantum Machine Learning (QML) and Quantum Deep Learning (QDL) are emerging research areas that combine quantum computing with machine learning and deep learning techniques.These approaches aim to improve computational speed, feature representation, optimisation, and learning performance in complex data-driven problems.This review paper presents a structured discussion of recent developments in QML and QDL, focusing on major algorithms, application areas, implementation approaches, current limitations, and future research directions.The review covers important quantum-based learning methods, including quantum support vector machines, quantum k-nearest neighbours, quantum principal component analysis, quantum neural networks, variational quantum classifiers, quantum convolutional neural networks, quantum reinforcement learning, quantum generative models, and hybrid quantum-classical models.The paper also discusses how these methods are being explored in healthcare, finance, cybersecurity, communication networks, image processing, natural language processing, and optimisation.However, the review shows that most QML and QDL models are still in the early stages of research.Current challenges include noisy quantum hardware, limited qubit count, data encoding issues, circuit design problems, difficulties with model training, and a lack of standardised benchmarks.The review concludes that QML and QDL have strong future potential, but their practical success depends on improved hardware, stronger algorithms, reliable frameworks, and fair comparison with classical models.