Quantum computing-enhanced deep learning for real-time detection and mitigation of cyberattack patterns

Cyberattacks are increasing in sophistication. As a result, traditional cybersecurity systems based on classical computing and conventional deep-learning techniques are increasingly exhibiting limitations and vulnerabilities. Although deep-learning models offer substantial advantages over traditional methods for automated intrusion detection through large-scale security data analysis and pattern recognition, they suffer from notable constraints related to high-dimensional feature spaces, scalability, and stringent real-time inference requirements. This work proposes a quantum-enhanced deep learning (QEDL) framework for detecting and mitigating real-time cyberattack patterns. Quantum computing technologies—specifically quantum feature selection and quantum data encoding—are integrated into a classical–hybrid quantum deep-learning architecture. The quantum approximate optimization algorithm (QAOA) is employed for quantum feature selection to enable efficient identification of discriminative features from high-dimensional cybersecurity datasets. In addition, quantum data encoding exploits superposition and entanglement to process multiple complex inputs simultaneously. The resulting quantum feature representations are processed using parameterized quantum circuits (PQCs), followed by classical deep-learning layers for accurate threat classification. The proposed QEDL framework is evaluated using the CIC–IDS2017 dataset, and its performance is compared against classical deep-learning models and pure quantum neural networks. Experimental results demonstrate that, within the proposed hybrid quantum–classical framework, the QAOA-based feature selection strategy achieved higher classification performance than the evaluated classical feature selection methods under the reported experimental settings. In addition, the proposed framework exhibited improved generalization to previously unseen attacks. These findings suggest that the proposed hybrid quantum–classical framework is a promising approach for cyberattack detection under the experimental conditions considered in this study. The experiments in this study were simulated using IBM Aer backend, without physical quantum hardware. The results obtained in this study serve as a simulation-based proof of concept.