Introducing Quantum Computing in Mobile Malware Detection

Mobile malware are increasing their complexity to be able to evade the current detection mechanism by gathering our sensitive and private information. For this reason, an active research field is represented by malware detection, with a great effort in the development of deep learning models starting from a set of malicious and legitimate applications. The recent introduction of quantum computing made possible quantum machine learning i.e., the integration of quantum algorithms within machine learning algorithms. In this paper, we propose a comparison between several deep learning models, by taking into account also a hybrid quantum malware detector. We explore the effectiveness of different architectures for malicious family detection in the Android environment: LeNet, AlexNet, a Convolutional Neural Network model designed by authors, VGG16 and a Hybrid Quantum Convolutional Neural Network i.e., a model where the first layer is a quantum convolution that uses transformations in circuits to simulate the behavior of a quantum computer. Experiments performed on a real-world dataset composed of 8446 Android malicious and legitimate applications allow us to compare the various models, with particular regard to the quantum model concerning the other ones.