Quantum as a Service Architecture for Security in a Smart City

Smart Cities are becoming a reality now with ample interest and investment from both government and private entities. As the number of Smart Cities increases, so does the sheer size and variety of data, the major part of which comes from Internet of Things (IoT) sensors embedded in devices. Millions of intelligent devices may be vulnerable to cyberattacks or threats, potentially harming one or more connected devices or exposing sensitive data. Therefore, Smart Cities have Intelligent Operations Centers (IOC), using different machine learning (ML) algorithms to monitor the data and take necessary actions to protect or contain any security incident. The advent of Quantum Computing (QC) has led to many initiatives for using QC in various applications of a Smart City but using Quantum Computing as a service is not yet fully contemplated in this context. In this work, we propose an architecture for Smart City security using Quantum as a Service (QaaS) for analyzing and classifying Smart City data. The proposed architecture uses two different Quantum Classifiers, implemented in the D-Wave Leap Quantum Cloud (QBoost) and IBM Quantum Services (Variational Quantum Classifier), for real-time classification of data and displays security incidents on a conveniently designed dashboard for further actions by the Security Operations Center (SOC) specialist. Further experiments have shown that D-Wave Leap Quantum Cloud-based QBoost performed the best among the quantum classifiers both regarding quality and time.