Detecting Fraudulent Services on Quantum Cloud Platforms via Dynamic Fingerprinting

TL;DR

This paper presents a practical dynamic fingerprinting technique to detect fraudulent quantum cloud services by comparing device-specific error signatures with expected results, ensuring service integrity.

Contribution

It introduces a novel, low-cost dynamic fingerprinting method using a single probing circuit to identify fraudulent quantum cloud services.

Findings

Effective detection of fraudulent services on IBM Quantum devices

Low computational cost due to single circuit fingerprinting

Successful identification of service fraud through fingerprint comparison

Abstract

Noisy Intermediate-Scale Quantum (NISQ) devices, while accessible via cloud platforms, face challenges due to limited availability and suboptimal quality. These challenges raise the risk of cloud providers offering fraudulent services. This emphasizes the need for users to detect such fraud to protect their investments and ensure computational integrity. This study introduces a novel dynamic fingerprinting method for detecting fraudulent service provision on quantum cloud platforms, specifically targeting machine substitution and profile fabrication attacks. The dynamic fingerprint is constructed using a \textit{single} probing circuit to capture the unique error characteristics of quantum devices, making this approach practical because of its trivial computational costs. When the user examines the service, the execution results of the probing circuit act as the device-side fingerprint of the quantum device providing the service. The user then generates the user-side fingerprint by estimating the expected execution result, assuming the correct device is in use. We propose an algorithm for users to construct the user-side fingerprint with linear complexity. By comparing the device-side and user-side fingerprints, users can effectively detect fraudulent services. Our experiments on the IBM Quantum platform, involving seven devices with varying capabilities, confirm the method's effectiveness.