Forensics of Error Rates of Quantum Hardware

TL;DR

This paper investigates the error rates of quantum hardware by analyzing transpilation processes and qubit routing, revealing insights into backend error characteristics and potential vulnerabilities in third-party quantum cloud services.

Contribution

It introduces a method to estimate backend error rates by examining transpilation and qubit routing, providing a forensic approach to assess hardware reliability.

Findings

Achieved up to 83.5% accuracy in ranking qubit links by error rates

Demonstrated the ability to infer error rates from transpiled circuit analysis

Provided insights into potential security vulnerabilities in quantum cloud services

Abstract

There has been a rise in third-party cloud providers offering quantum hardware as a service to improve performance at lower cost. Although these providers provide flexibility to the users to choose from several qubit technologies, quantum hardware, and coupling maps; the actual execution of the program is not clearly visible to the customer. The success of the user program, in addition to various other metadata such as cost, performance, & number of iterations to converge, depends on the error rate of the backend used. Moreover, the third-party provider and/or tools (e.g., hardware allocator and mapper) may hold insider/outsider adversarial agents to conserve resources and maximize profit by running the quantum circuits on error-prone hardware. Thus it is important to gain visibility of the backend from various perspectives of the computing process e.g., execution, transpilation and outcomes. In this paper, we estimate the error rate of the backend from the original and transpiled circuit. For the forensics, we exploit the fact that qubit mapping and routing steps of the transpilation process select qubits and qubit pairs with less single qubit and two-qubit gate errors to minimize overall error accumulation, thereby, giving us clues about the error rates of the various parts of the backend. We ranked qubit links into bins based on ECR error rates publicly available, and compared it to the rankings derived from our investigation of the relative frequency of a qubit link being chosen by the transpiler. For upto 83.5% of the qubit links in IBM Sherbrooke and 80% in IBM Brisbane, 127 qubit IBM backends, we are able to assign a bin rank which has a difference upto 2 with the bin rank assigned on the basis of actual error rate information.