Quantum deep learning-based anomaly detection for enhanced network security

Abstract Identifying and mitigating aberrant activities within the network traffic is important to prevent adverse consequences caused by cyber security incidents, which have been increasing significantly in recent times. Existing research mainly focuses on classical machine learning and deep learning-based approaches for detecting such attacks. However, exploiting the power of quantum deep learning to process complex correlation of features for anomaly detection is not well explored. Hence, in this paper, we investigate quantum machine learning and quantum deep learning-based anomaly detection methodologies to accurately detect network attacks. In particular, we propose three novel quantum auto-encoder-based anomaly detection frameworks. Our primary aim is to create hybrid models that leverage the strengths of both quantum and deep learning methodologies for efficient anomaly recognition. The three frameworks are formed by integrating the quantum autoencoder with a quantum one-class support vector machine, a quantum random forest, and a quantum k -nearest neighbor approach. The anomaly detection capability of the frameworks is evaluated using benchmark datasets comprising computer and Internet of Things network flows. Our evaluation demonstrates that all three frameworks have a high potential to detect the network traffic anomalies accurately, while the framework that integrates the quantum autoencoder with the quantum k -nearest neighbor yields the highest accuracy. This demonstrates the promising potential for the development of quantum frameworks for anomaly detection, underscoring their relevance for future advancements in network security.