Pulse-Level Simulation of Crosstalk Attacks on Superconducting Quantum Hardware

TL;DR

This paper investigates pulse-level crosstalk attacks on superconducting quantum computers, modeling their dynamics and assessing their impact on quantum protocols to enhance security measures.

Contribution

It introduces a simulation framework for pulse-level crosstalk attacks, analyzing attack strategies and their effects on quantum computations and protocols.

Findings

Certain protocols are highly vulnerable to pulse crosstalk attacks.

Attack configurations can induce significant logical errors.

Some protocols demonstrate robustness against these attacks.

Abstract

Hardware crosstalk in multi-tenant superconducting quantum computers poses a severe security threat, allowing adversaries to induce targeted errors across tenant boundaries by injecting carefully engineered pulses. We present a simulation-based study of active crosstalk attacks at the pulse level, analyzing how adversarial control of pulse timing, shape, amplitude, and coupling can disrupt a victim's computation. Our framework models the time-dependent dynamics of a three-qubit system in the rotating frame, capturing both always-on couplings and injected drive pulses. We examine two attack strategies: attacker-first (pulse before victim operation) and victim-first (pulse after), and systematically identify the pulse and coupling configurations that cause the largest logical errors. Protocol-level experiments on quantum coin flip and XOR classification circuits show that some protocols are highly vulnerable to these attacks, while others remain robust. Based on these findings, we discuss practical methods for detection and mitigation to improve security in quantum cloud platforms.