Towards Quantum Optimised Malware Containment

TL;DR

This paper introduces a hybrid quantum approach for malware containment in networks, significantly reducing computational complexity in influence estimation and edge removal optimization compared to classical methods.

Contribution

It combines Quantum Amplitude Estimation and Grover Minimum Finding to improve efficiency in network influence minimization problems for malware containment.

Findings

Quantum methods reduce influence estimation complexity from O(1/ε²) to O(1/ε).

Grover search decreases candidate evaluation from O(|E_C|) to O(√|E_C|).

Preliminary experiments support theoretical scalability.

Abstract

The containment of malware in computing networks may be naturally formulated as a network influence minimisation problem, in which one seeks to limit the expected spread of an infection while balancing the operational cost of disabling network connections. Classical approaches often rely on Monte Carlo simulation of stochastic diffusion processes and greedy optimisation over candidate edge removals, resulting in significant computational overhead due to repeated influence evaluations. In this work, we propose a hybrid quantum approach which combines Quantum Amplitude Estimation (QAE) and Grover Minimum Finding (GMF) to provide quadratic improvements in both the estimation and optimisation components of the problem. Specifically, QAE replaces classical Monte Carlo simulation, reducing the sampling complexity of influence estimation from $O(1/\varepsilon^2)$ to $O(1/\varepsilon)$ for a target additive error $\varepsilon \ll 1$, while GMF reduces the number of candidate evaluations required to identify optimal edge removals from $O(|E_C|)$ to $O(\sqrt{|E_C|})$. We present a formal problem definition, describe the construction of the corresponding quantum oracles, and analyse the resulting complexity improvements under standard oracle assumptions. Preliminary experiments, including classical simulation of QAE and small-scale execution of Grover search on real quantum hardware, support the expected theoretical scaling. While practical implementation at scale requires fault-tolerant quantum devices, our results demonstrate that quantum algorithms offer a promising long-term direction for accelerating stochastic network optimisation problems such as malware containment.