QCIVET: A Quantum--Classical Pipeline Integrity Framework with Contract-Based Subtype Verification and Hash-Chained Audit Traces

TL;DR

QCIVET is a comprehensive framework for verifying the integrity of hybrid quantum-classical pipelines, combining hash-chained audits with quantum-specific behavioral tests, validated on real quantum hardware.

Contribution

It introduces a novel contract-based verification framework that models hybrid pipelines and verifies quantum stages using behavioral subtyping and hash chains.

Findings

Proves soundness under diamond-norm distance between quantum channels.

Validates subtype-separation protocol on real IBM quantum hardware.

Demonstrates effectiveness on applications like VQE, fraud detection, and cloud QPU auditing.

Abstract

Hybrid quantum--classical pipelines increasingly support applications such as drug discovery, fraud detection, and cloud quantum processing unit (QPU) auditing, yet existing integrity-verification methods remain largely classical and fail to capture quantum-stage behaviour. We propose QCIVET, a contract-based integrity-verification framework that models a hybrid pipeline as a sequence of stages with explicit specifications and audits it at both syntactic and semantic levels. Syntactic integrity is enforced through a hash-chained audit trail with optional external anchoring, while semantic integrity at quantum stages is verified using a calibrated observable-deviation test grounded in the behavioural-subtyping discipline of Liskov and Wing. We prove soundness under the diamond-norm distance between quantum channels, conditional completeness for informationally complete observable families, and compositionality under inheritance chains. We further identify a class of Z-only-sneaky overrides that evade weak single-Pauli contracts but are exposed by multi-Pauli contracts. The framework is evaluated under calibration-derived noise models from IBM Quantum Eagle r3 and Heron r2 processors, and the subtype-separation protocol is validated end-to-end on a real ibm_fez (Heron r2) processor. QCIVET is instantiated on three representative applications: variational quantum eigensolver (VQE) for drug discovery, quantum-assisted fraud detection, and customer-side auditing of cloud QPU services. The reference implementation, including a real-time verification engine with sub-millisecond per-stage commit latency, is released as open source.