HyQ2: A Hybrid Quantum Neural Network for NextG Vulnerability Detection

As fifth-generation (5G) and next-generation communication systems advance and find widespread application in critical infrastructures, the importance of vulnerability detection becomes increasingly critical. The growing complexity of these systems necessitates rigorous testing and analysis, with stringent requirements for both accuracy and speed. In this article, we present a state-of-the-art supervised hybrid quantum neural network named HyQ2 for vulnerability detection in next-generation wireless communication systems. The proposed HyQ2 is integrated with graph-embedded and quantum variational circuits to validate and detect vulnerabilities from the 5G system's state transitions based on graphs extracted from log files. We address the limitations of classical machine learning models in processing the intrinsic linkage relationships of high-dimensional data. These models often suffer from dead neurons and excessively large outputs caused by the unbounded range of the rectified linear unit (ReLU) activation function. We propose the HyQ2 method to overcome these challenges, which constructs quantum neurons by selecting random neurons' outputs from a classical neural network. These quantum neurons are then utilized to capture more complex relationships, effectively limiting the ReLU output. Using only two qubits, our validation results demonstrate that HyQ2 outperforms traditional classical machine learning models in vulnerability detection. The small and compact variational circuit of HyQ2 minimizes the noise and errors in the measurement. Our results demonstrate that HyQ2 achieves a high area under the curve (AUC) value of 0.9708 and an accuracy of 95.91%. To test the model's performance in quantum noise environments, we simulate quantum noise by adding bit flipping, phase flipping, amplitude damping, and depolarizing noise. The results show that the prediction accuracy and receiver operating characteristic AUC value fluctuate around 0.2%, indicating HyQ2’s robustness in noisy quantum environments. In addition, the noise resilience and robustness of the HyQ2 algorithm were substantiated through experiments on the IBM quantum machine with only a 0.2% decrease compared to the simulation results.