https://doi.org/10.1140/epjqt/s40507-025-00414-6
Review
A systematic review of anomaly detection in IoT security: towards quantum machine learning approach
1
Department of Computer Science and Engineering, Seoul National University of Science and Technology, 01811, Seoul, South Korea
2
School of Cyber Science and Engineering, Huazhong University of Science and Technology, 430074, Wuhan, China
a
This email address is being protected from spambots. You need JavaScript enabled to view it.
Received:
26
June
2025
Accepted:
8
September
2025
Published online:
29
September
2025
Integrating IoT into daily life generates massive data, enabling smart factories and driving advancements in related technologies like cloud/edge computing, ML, and AI. While ML has been used for data analysis and forecasting, challenges such as data complexity, security, and computing limitations persist, particularly in anomaly detection crucial for network security. Recent research indicates the potential of quantum computing and Quantum Machine Learning (QML) to outperform traditional methods in anomaly detection within IoT, an area lacking a comprehensive review. This paper presents a systematic review of Machine Learning-based anomaly detection techniques for IoT security. Despite previous reviews, this study includes the analysis of feature engineering and quantum machine learning techniques in literature. Our findings show that current models have high detection rates on known datasets, but face scalability, real-time processing, and generalization issues. Privacy and security concerns in federated learning (FL) and the effects of data drift also need to be addressed, along with the challenges of 5G and 6G-enabled IoT environments. Future directions include integrating Explainable AI into anomaly detection, exploring adaptive learning techniques, and combining blockchain with machine learning models. The study also highlights the potential of quantum computing to enhance threat detection through quantum machine learning models.
Key words: Quantum Machine Learning / Anomaly Detection / IoT / Security / Systematic Review
© The Author(s) 2025
Open Access This article is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives 4.0 International License, which permits any non-commercial use, sharing, distribution and reproduction in any medium or format, as long as you give appropriate credit to the original author(s) and the source, provide a link to the Creative Commons licence, and indicate if you modified the licensed material. You do not have permission under this licence to share adapted material derived from this article or parts of it. The images or other third party material in this article are included in the article’s Creative Commons licence, unless indicated otherwise in a credit line to the material. If material is not included in the article’s Creative Commons licence and your intended use is not permitted by statutory regulation or exceeds the permitted use, you will need to obtain permission directly from the copyright holder. To view a copy of this licence, visit http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-nd/4.0/.

