VQC-ZTI Variational Quantum Control for Zero Trust Protection of the Tactile Internet
A split-plane zero-trust framework that performs hybrid variational quantum anomaly scoring on mirrored encrypted-flow telemetry while keeping deterministic policy enforcement outside the quantum inference path.
Framework Overview
VQC-ZTI separates asynchronous anomaly-evidence generation from latency-critical zero-trust enforcement so that quantum inference does not become a synchronous hop in the current control path.
Hybrid Quantum-Classical Learning
A classical embedder, 12-qubit variational quantum circuit, and classical classification head are trained end-to-end through PyTorch and PennyLane.
Zero-Trust Enforcement
Risk evidence is separated from policy execution. Cached PEP actions provide deterministic grant, restrict, step-up, or deny enforcement.
Distribution-Shift Evaluation
The model is evaluated under random, entity-group, and temporal holdouts using CESNET-derived aggregated encrypted-flow telemetry.
Split-Plane Architecture
Security evidence is generated asynchronously, while the immediate transaction remains on a lightweight deterministic enforcement path.
Policy Updates
Evaluation Results
Mean ± standard deviation across five runs for the full-hybrid QNN.
| Evaluation Split | ROC-AUC | Accuracy | FPR | FPR Reduction vs. ExtraTrees |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Random | 0.9981 ± 0.0004 | 0.9756 ± 0.0042 | 0.0270 ± 0.0050 | 44.6% |
| Entity-Group | 0.9974 ± 0.0009 | 0.9762 ± 0.0028 | 0.0241 ± 0.0042 | 49.6% |
| Temporal | 0.9941 ± 0.0018 | 0.9747 ± 0.0044 | 0.0248 ± 0.0052 | 67.9% |
Experimental Configuration
Quantum Model
12 qubits · 2 variational layers · Pauli-Y angle encoding · nearest-neighbor CNOT entanglement · Pauli-Z expectation measurements.
Training
20 epochs · batch size 32 · learning rate 2×10⁻³ · random seeds 42–46 · class-weighted negative log-likelihood.
Execution Setting
Noiseless analytic expectation values. Finite-shot uncertainty, physical hardware noise, transpilation, and queueing effects are outside the reported evaluation.
Authors
Citation
If you use VQC-ZTI, the implementation, methodology, or reported experimental results, please cite the associated paper.
@misc{sudipto2026vqczti,
title = {{VQC-ZTI}: Variational Quantum Control for Zero Trust Protection of the Tactile Internet},
author = {Sudipto, Mubassir Serneabat and Ahmed, Shakil and Khokhar, Ashfaq},
year = {2026},
eprint = {2608.18572},
archivePrefix = {arXiv},
primaryClass = {cs.CR},
doi = {10.48550/arXiv.2608.18572},
url = {https://arxiv.org/abs/2608.18572},
note = {Accepted at IEEE Global Communications Conference (GLOBECOM 2026)}
}