Cyber Threat Detection Enabled by Quantum Computing

TL;DR

This paper demonstrates that small, noisy quantum processors can be integrated into cybersecurity threat detection systems, providing competitive performance and reducing missed attacks and false alarms compared to classical models.

Contribution

It introduces a hybrid quantum-classical architecture for threat detection, benchmarking quantum components against classical baselines on real datasets and deploying on actual quantum hardware.

Findings

Quantum heads match classical models on detection tasks.

Quantum components reduce missed attacks and false alarms.

Hardware results align with simulations, indicating noise is the main gap.

Abstract

Threat detection models in cybersecurity must keep up with shifting traffic, strict feature budgets, and noisy hardware, yet even strong classical systems still miss rare or borderline attacks when the data distribution drifts. Small, near-term quantum processors are now available, but existing work rarely shows whether quantum components can improve end-to-end detection under these unstable, resource constrained conditions rather than just adding complexity. We address this gap with a hybrid architecture that uses a compact multilayer perceptron to compress security data and then routes a few features to 2-4 qubit quantum heads implemented as quantum support vector machines and variational circuits. Under matched preprocessing and training budgets, we benchmark these hybrids against tuned classical baselines on two security tasks, network intrusion detection on NSL-KDD and spam filtering on Ling-Spam datasets, and then deploy the best 4-qubit quantum SVM to an IBM Quantum device with noise-aware execution (readout mitigation and dynamical decoupling). Across both datasets, shallow quantum heads consistently match, and on difficult near-boundary cases modestly reduce, missed attacks and false alarms relative to classical models using the same features. Hardware results track simulator behavior closely enough that the remaining gap is dominated by device noise rather than model design. Taken together, the study shows that even on small, noisy chips, carefully engineered quantum components can already function as competitive, budget-aware elements in practical threat detection pipelines.