Obfuscation of Arbitrary Quantum Circuits

TL;DR

This paper presents the first quantum obfuscation scheme for arbitrary quantum circuits with quantum inputs and outputs, using novel primitives and assuming post-quantum one-way functions, solving a longstanding open problem.

Contribution

It introduces a new primitive called subspace-preserving strong pseudorandom unitary and constructs a quantum ideal obfuscation scheme for general quantum circuits.

Findings

First quantum obfuscation scheme for arbitrary quantum circuits.

Introduction of subspace-preserving strong pseudorandom unitaries.

Scheme can be realized in the quantumly accessible pseudorandom oracle model.

Abstract

Program obfuscation aims to conceal a program's internal structure while preserving its functionality. A central open problem is whether an obfuscation scheme for arbitrary quantum circuits exists. Despite several efforts having been made toward this goal, prior works have succeeded only in obfuscating quantum circuits that implement either pseudo-deterministic functions or unitary transformations. Although unitary transformations already include a broad class of quantum computation, many important quantum tasks, such as state preparation and quantum error-correction, go beyond unitaries and fall within general completely positive trace-preserving maps. In this work, we construct the first quantum ideal obfuscation scheme for arbitrary quantum circuits that support quantum inputs and outputs in the classical oracle model assuming post-quantum one-way functions, thereby resolving an open problem posed in Bartusek et al. (STOC 2023), Bartusek, Brakerski, and Vaikuntanathan (STOC 2024), and Huang and Tang (FOCS 2025). At the core of our construction lies a novel primitive that we introduce, called the subspace-preserving strong pseudorandom unitary (spsPRU). An spsPRU is a family of efficient unitaries that fix every vector in a given linear subspace $S$, while acting as a Haar random unitary on the orthogonal complement $S^\perp$ under both forward and inverse oracle queries. Furthermore, by instantiating the classical oracle model with the ideal obfuscation scheme for classical circuits proposed by Jain et al. (CRYPTO 2023) and later enhanced by Bartusek et al. (arxiv:2510.05316), our obfuscation scheme can also be realized in the quantumly accessible pseudorandom oracle model.