Forensics of Transpiled Quantum Circuits

TL;DR

This paper introduces a method for forensic analysis of transpiled quantum circuits to identify the hardware backend used, achieving high accuracy in tracing circuits to their origin in quantum cloud services.

Contribution

The paper presents a novel approach to trace transpiled quantum circuits back to their hardware backend, enhancing transparency and trust in quantum cloud computing.

Findings

Achieved 97.33% accuracy in tracing circuits to the correct backend.

Successfully derived coupling maps from transpiled circuits across various topologies.

Demonstrated the method on multiple IBM quantum backends with different topologies.

Abstract

Many third-party cloud providers set up quantum hardware as a service that includes a wide range of qubit technologies and architectures to maximize performance at minimal cost. However, there is little visibility to where the execution of the circuit is taking place. This situation is similar to the classical cloud. The difference in the quantum scenario is that the success of the user program is highly reliant on the backend used. Besides, the third-party provider may be untrustworthy and execute the quantum circuits on less efficient and more error-prone hardware to maximize profit. Thus, gaining visibility on the backend from various aspects will be valuable. Effective forensics can have many applications including establishing trust in quantum cloud services. We introduce the problem of forensics in the domain of quantum computing. We trace the coupling map of the hardware where the transpilation of the circuit took place from the transpiled program. We perform experiments on various coupling topologies (linear, T-shaped, H-shaped, and loop) on IBM backends. We can derive the coupling map from the transpiled circuits with complete accuracy for almost every transpiled circuit we considered. We could correctly trace 97.33% of the programs to the correct backend.