Please use this identifier to cite or link to this item: http://bura.brunel.ac.uk/handle/2438/32659
Title: Cybersecurity-Driven Quantum Digital Twin for Proactive Threat Reversal in Open RAN
Authors: Al-Karawi, Y
Alhumaima, R
Al-Raweshidy, H
Keywords: quantum digital twin;open RAN;RAN security;adversarial channels;entanglement;reinforcement learning
Issue Date: 18-Feb-2026
Publisher: Wiley on behalf of Institution of Engineering and Technology (IET)
Citation: Al-Karawi, Y., Alhumaima, R. and Al-Raweshidy, H. (2026) 'Cybersecurity-Driven Quantum Digital Twin for Proactive Threat Reversal in Open RAN', IET Quantum Communication, 7 (1), e70027, pp. 1–21. doi: 10.1049/qtc2.70027.
Abstract: A cybersecurity-driven quantum digital twin (CQDT) is introduced to protect networked control chains against adversarial completely positive trace preserving perturbations. The design maps O-RAN telemetry to amplitude-encoded registers, forms multipartite entanglement through GHZ and one-dimensional cluster states and injects bit flip, phase flip and amplitude damping channels tied to measurable indicators. System integrity is tracked using fidelity \(F\)ₜ, von Neumann entropy \(S)\ₜ and trace distance \(D)\ₜ . A lightweight REINFORCE policy acts on these observables to preserve entanglement and limit decoherence within tight cycle-time budgets. Qiskit simulations maintain average fidelity above 0.91, entropy near 0.35 and trace distance below 0.18 under composite noise. Attack classification exceeds 87% with a software-loop latency of about 19.1 ms covering state preparation, entanglement, CPTP injection, measurement and policy inference. Compared with classical intrusion detection and thresholding over quantum observables, the framework improves detection while reducing false alarms and exposes quantum-state degradation in real time. The result is a reproducible and scalable basis for learning-based quantum-aware protection in disaggregated radio access networks and related systems.
Description: Data Availability Statement: Researchers can use the framework easily because all the files needed to implement the cybersecurity-driven quantum digital twin (CQDT) simulation are openly available. Quantum state encoding, building quantum entanglements, using adversarial channels with complete positivity and trace preservation (CPTP) and reinforcement learning-guided defence policies are all part of the code [45]. GitHub Repository: https://github.com/Yassirameen22/cqdt-simulator. Zenodo Archive (DOI): https://doi.org/10.5281/zenodo.15566309.
URI: https://bura.brunel.ac.uk/handle/2438/32659
DOI: https://doi.org/10.1049/qtc2.70027
Other Identifiers: ORCiD: Yassir Al-Karawi https://orcid.org/0000-0003-2959-3893
ORCiD: Raad S. Alhumaima https://orcid.org/0000-0002-8000-5965
ORCiD: Hamed Al-Raweshidy https://orcid.org/0000-0002-3702-8192
Appears in Collections:Department of Electronic and Electrical Engineering Research Papers

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