A Comprehensive Review on Cybersecurity in the Era of AI and Quantum Computing: Emerging Threats, Defense Mechanisms, and Applications

초록

The rapid advancement of artificial intelligence (AI) and quantum computing is fundamentally reshaping the cybersecurity landscape by introducing intelligent automation, enhanced computational power, and novel security risks. AI enables adaptive and large-scale cyber operations that affect both attack sophistication and defensive intelligence, while quantum computing threatens the cryptographic foundations that ensure secure communication and long-term data confidentiality. The convergence of these technologies challenges traditional security assumptions and impacts the reliability of modern digital systems. Despite significant progress in AI-based security and quantum-resilient technologies, existing cybersecurity approaches struggle to effectively address the combined influence of AI-enabled threats and quantum-era vulnerabilities. Learning-based and generative cyber-attacks, together with emerging cryptographic risks such as long-term decryption exposure, expose critical limitations in conventional defense mechanisms. Furthermore, fragmented research efforts hinder a comprehensive understanding of how these technologies jointly affect cybersecurity across diverse application domains. In this paper, we present a comprehensive review on cybersecurity in the era of AI and quantum computing, focusing on emerging threats, defense mechanisms, and practical applications. We analyze recent advances in AI-driven attack and defense techniques, post-quantum cryptographic solutions, and hybrid security architectures, and examine their applicability in key domains including financial systems, healthcare, and distributed computing environments. By synthesizing recent academic and industrial developments, this review identifies open challenges and future research directions, providing insights to support the development of secure and trustworthy digital systems in increasingly complex threat environments.

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