A Quantum Algorithm To Locate Unknown Hashgrams
This addresses a cybersecurity challenge for malware detection, but it appears incremental as it applies existing quantum search methods to a specific domain.
The paper tackles the problem of speeding up the mapping of n-grams to their hashes for malware identification by proposing a quantum algorithm that reduces the time complexity from O(MN) to O(√N) for table lookups.
Quantum computing has evolved quickly in recent years and is showing significant benefits in a variety of fields, especially in the realm of cybersecurity. The combination of software used to locate the most frequent hashes and $n$-grams that identify malicious software could greatly benefit from a quantum algorithm. By loading the table of hashes and $n$-grams into a quantum computer we can speed up the process of mapping $n$-grams to their hashes. The first phase will be to use KiloGram to find the top-$k$ hashes and $n$-grams for a large malware corpus. From here, the resulting hash table is then loaded into a quantum simulator. A quantum search algorithm is then used search among every permutation of the entangled key and value pairs to find the desired hash value. This prevents one from having to re-compute hashes for a set of $n$-grams, which can take on average $O(MN)$ time, whereas the quantum algorithm could take $O(\sqrt{N})$ in the number of table lookups to find the desired hash values.