Watermarking of Quantum Circuits

TL;DR

This paper introduces two lightweight quantum circuit watermarking techniques to protect intellectual property, demonstrating minimal impact on circuit performance and superior robustness compared to existing methods.

Contribution

The authors propose novel, low-overhead quantum circuit watermarking methods that enhance ownership verification with minimal circuit disruption and improved robustness.

Findings

PST reduced by 0.53% compared to non-watermarked circuits

Watermarking increases robustness by up to 22.69% over existing techniques

Circuit depth reduced by up to 27.7% with proposed methods

Abstract

Quantum circuits constitute Intellectual Property (IP) of the quantum developers and users, which needs to be protected from theft by adversarial agents, e.g., the quantum cloud provider or a rogue adversary present in the cloud. This necessitates the exploration of low-overhead techniques applicable to near-term quantum devices, to trace the quantum circuits/algorithms\textquotesingle{} IP and their output. We present two such lightweight watermarking techniques to prove ownership in the event of an adversary cloning the circuit design. For the first technique, a rotation gate is placed on ancilla qubits combined with other gate(s) at the output of the circuit. For the second method, a set of random gates are inserted in the middle of the circuit followed by its inverse, separated from the circuit by a barrier. These models are combined and applied on benchmark circuits, and the circuit depth, 2-qubit gate count, probability of successful trials (PST), and probabilistic proof of authorship (PPA) are compared against the state-of-the-art. The PST is reduced by a minuscule 0.53\% against the non-watermarked benchmarks and is up to 22.69\% higher compared to existing techniques. The circuit depth has been reduced by up to 27.7\% as against the state-of-the-art. The PPA is astronomically smaller than existing watermarks.