Quantum Computing (QC) has gained immense popularity as a potential solution to deal with the ever-increasing size of data and associated challenges leveraging the concept of quantum random access memory (QRAM). QC promises-quadratic or exponential increases in computational time with quantum parallelism and thus offer a huge leap forward in the computation of Machine Learning algorithms. This paper analyzes speed up performance of QC when applied to machine learning algorithms, known as Quantum Machine Learning (QML). We applied QML methods such as Quantum Support Vector Machine (QSVM), and Quantum Neural Network (QNN) to detect Software Supply Chain (SSC) attacks. Due to the access limitations of real quantum computers, the QML methods were implemented on open-source quantum simulators such as IBM Qiskit and TensorFlow Quantum. We evaluated the performance of QML in terms of processing speed and accuracy and finally, compared with its classical counterparts. Interestingly, the experimental results differ to the speed up promises of QC by demonstrating higher computational time and lower accuracy in comparison to the classical approaches for SSC attacks.

Software vulnerabilities have become a serious problem with the emergence of new applications that contain potentially vulnerable or malicious code that can compromise the system. The growing volume and complexity of software source codes have opened a need for vulnerability detection methods to successfully predict malicious codes before being the prey of cyberattacks. As leveraging humans to check sources codes requires extensive time and resources and preexisting static code analyzers are unable to properly detect vulnerable codes. Thus, artificial intelligence techniques, mainly deep learning models, have gained traction to detect source code vulnerability. A systematic review is carried out to explore and understand the various deep learning methods employed for the task and their efficacy as a prediction model. Additionally, a summary of each process and its characteristics are examined and its implementation on specific data sets and their evaluation will be discussed.

With the rapid technological advancement, security has become a major issue due to the increase in malware activity that poses a serious threat to the security and safety of both computer systems and stakeholders. To maintain stakeholder’s, particularly, end user’s security, protecting the data from fraudulent efforts is one of the most pressing concerns. A set of malicious programming code, scripts, active content, or intrusive software that is designed to destroy intended computer systems and programs or mobile and web applications is referred to as malware. According to a study, naive users are unable to distinguish between malicious and benign applications. Thus, computer systems and mobile applications should be designed to detect malicious activities towards protecting the stakeholders. A number of algorithms are available to detect malware activities by utilizing novel concepts including Artificial Intelligence, Machine Learning, and Deep Learning. In this study, we emphasize Artificial Intelligence (AI) based techniques for detecting and preventing malware activity. We present a detailed review of current malware detection technologies, their shortcomings, and ways to improve efficiency. Our study shows that adopting futuristic approaches for the development of malware detection applications shall provide significant advantages. The comprehension of this synthesis shall help researchers for further research on malware detection and prevention using AI.

Traditional network intrusion detection approaches encounter feasibility and sustainability issues to combat modern, sophisticated, and unpredictable security attacks. Deep neural networks (DNN) have been successfully applied for intrusion detection problems. The optimal use of DNN-based classifiers requires careful tuning of the hyper-parameters. Manually tuning the hyperparameters is tedious, time-consuming, and computationally expensive. Hence, there is a need for an automatic technique to find optimal hyperparameters for the best use of DNN in intrusion detection. This paper proposes a novel Bayesian optimization-based framework for the automatic optimization of hyperparameters, ensuring the best DNN architecture. We evaluated the performance of the proposed framework on NSL-KDD, a benchmark dataset for network intrusion detection. The experimental results show the framework’s effectiveness as the resultant DNN architecture demonstrates significantly higher intrusion detection performance than the random search optimization-based approach in terms of accuracy, precision, recall, and f1-score.