Quantum Autoencoders for Anomaly Detection in Cybersecurity

Abstract: Anomaly detection in cybersecurity is a challenging task, where normal events far outnumber anomalous ones with new anomalies occurring frequently. Classical autoencoders have been used for anomaly detection, but struggles in data-limited settings which quantum counterparts can potentially overcome. In this work, we apply Quantum Autoencoders (QAEs) for anomaly detection in cybersecurity, specifically on the BPF-extended tracking honeypot (BETH) dataset. QAEs are evaluated across multiple encoding techniques, ansatz types, repetitions, and feature selection strategies. Our results demonstrate that an 8-feature QAE using Dense-Angle encoding with a RealAmplitude ansatz can outperform Classical Autoencoders (CAEs), even when trained on substantially fewer samples. The effects of quantum encoding and feature selection for developing quantum models are demonstrated and discussed. In a data-limited setting, the best performing QAE model has a F1 score of 0.87, better than that of CAE (0.77). These findings suggest that QAEs may offer practical advantages for anomaly detection in data-limited scenarios.