Towards an Antivirus for Quantum Computers

TL;DR

This paper discusses security vulnerabilities in cloud-based quantum computing, highlighting how crosstalk can be exploited for attacks, and proposes compile-time analysis techniques to detect malicious circuits before execution.

Contribution

It introduces a novel approach to identify malicious quantum circuits by analyzing crosstalk effects, inspired by classical computer security methods.

Findings

Crosstalk can significantly impact Grover's algorithm performance.

Potential for fault injection attacks via crosstalk in multi-tenant quantum environments.

Proposed compile-time analysis to detect malicious circuit patterns.

Abstract

Researchers are today exploring models for cloud-based usage of quantum computers where multi-tenancy can be used to share quantum computer hardware among multiple users. Multi-tenancy has a promise of allowing better utilization of the quantum computer hardware, but also opens up the quantum computer to new types of security attacks. As this and other recent research shows, it is possible to perform a fault injection attack using crosstalk on quantum computers when a victim and attacker circuits are instantiated as co-tenants on the same quantum computer. To ensure such attacks do not happen, this paper proposes that new techniques should be developed to help catch malicious circuits before they are loaded onto quantum computer hardware. Following ideas from classical computers, a compile-time technique can be designed to scan quantum computer programs for malicious or suspicious code patterns before they are compiled into quantum circuits that run on a quantum computer. This paper presents ongoing work which demonstrates how crosstalk can affect Grover's algorithm, and then presents suggestions of how quantum programs could be analyzed to catch circuits that generate large amounts of crosstalk with malicious intent.