A Survey and Tutorial on Security and Resilience of Quantum Computing

TL;DR

This paper reviews the security and resilience challenges of current quantum computers, including noise, errors, security threats, and countermeasures, providing a comprehensive overview and future outlook.

Contribution

It offers a comprehensive survey and tutorial on quantum computer security and resilience, highlighting vulnerabilities, attack models, and countermeasures.

Findings

Quantum computers face significant noise and error issues affecting fidelity.

Security threats include input tampering, reverse engineering, and cloning.

Countermeasures are discussed for improving reliability and security.

Abstract

Present-day quantum computers suffer from various noises or errors such as gate error, relaxation, dephasing, readout error, and crosstalk. Besides, they offer a limited number of qubits with restrictive connectivity. Therefore, quantum programs running these computers face resilience issues and low output fidelities. The noise in the cloud-based access of quantum computers also introduces new modes of security and privacy issues. Furthermore, quantum computers face several threat models from insider and outsider adversaries including input tampering, program misallocation, fault injection, Reverse Engineering (RE), and Cloning. This paper provides an overview of various assets embedded in quantum computers and programs, vulnerabilities and attack models, and the relation between resilience and security. We also cover countermeasures against the reliability and security issues and present a future outlook for the security of quantum computing.