The emerging paradigm of Quantum Machine Learning (QML) combines features of
quantum computing and machine learning (ML). QML enables the generation and
recognition of statistical data patterns that classical computers and classical
ML methods struggle to effectively execute. QML utilizes quantum systems to
enhance algorithmic computation speed and real-time data processing
capabilities, making it one of the most promising tools in the field of ML.
Quantum superposition and entanglement features also hold the promise to
potentially expand the potential feature representation capabilities of ML.
Therefore, in this study, we explore how quantum computing affects ML and
whether it can further improve the detection performance on network traffic
detection, especially on unseen attacks which are types of malicious traffic
that do not exist in the ML training dataset. Classical ML models often perform
poorly in detecting these unseen attacks because they have not been trained on
such traffic. Hence, this paper focuses on designing and proposing novel hybrid
structures of Quantum Convolutional Neural Network (QCNN) to achieve the
detection of malicious traffic. The detection performance, generalization, and
robustness of the QML solutions are evaluated and compared with classical ML
running on classical computers. The emphasis lies in assessing whether the
QML-based malicious traffic detection outperforms classical solutions. Based on
experiment results, QCNN models demonstrated superior performance compared to
classical ML approaches on unseen attack detection.