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Short Paper: A Quantum Circuit Obfuscation Methodology for Security and Privacy

Published: 04 June 2022 Publication History

Abstract

In the Noisy Intermediate-Scale Quantum (NISQ) realm, efficient quantum circuit compilation is critical to ensure successful computation. Several third-party compilers are improving the compilation times and depth/gate counts. Untrusted third parties or a particular version of a trusted compiler may allow an attacker to steal, clone, and/or reverse engineer the quantum circuit. We propose to obfuscate quantum circuits by employing dummy CNOT gates to prevent such threats. If the adversary clones the obfuscated design, he/she will get faulty results. We propose a metric-based dummy gate insertion process to ensure maximum corruption of functionality measured using Total Variation Distance (TVD) and validated using IBM’s noisy simulators. Our metric guided dummy gate insertion process achieves TVD of up to 28.83%, and performs 10.14% better than the average TVD and performs within 12.45% of the best obtainable TVD for the test benchmarks. The removal of dummy gates by the designer post-compilation to restore functionality as well as other finer details have been addressed.

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Presentation slides (HASPSlides.pptx)

References

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Abdullah Ash-Saki, Mahabubul Alam, and Swaroop Ghosh. 2020. Analysis of Crosstalk in NISQ Devices and Security Implications in Multi-Programming Regime. In Proceedings of the ACM/IEEE International Symposium on Low Power Electronics and Design (Boston, Massachusetts) (ISLPED ’20). Association for Computing Machinery, New York, NY, USA, 25–30.
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Cited By

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  • (2024)Trustworthy and reliable computing using untrusted and unreliable quantum hardwareFrontiers in Computer Science10.3389/fcomp.2024.14317886Online publication date: 26-Aug-2024
  • (2024)Stealthy SWAPs: Adversarial SWAP Injection in Multi-Tenant Quantum Computing2024 37th International Conference on VLSI Design and 2024 23rd International Conference on Embedded Systems (VLSID)10.1109/VLSID60093.2024.00085(474-479)Online publication date: 6-Jan-2024
  • (2024)NISQ Quantum Computing: A Security-Centric Tutorial and Survey [Feature]IEEE Circuits and Systems Magazine10.1109/MCAS.2024.334966524:1(14-32)Online publication date: Sep-2025
  • Show More Cited By

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cover image ACM Other conferences
HASP '21: Proceedings of the 10th International Workshop on Hardware and Architectural Support for Security and Privacy
October 2021
61 pages
ISBN:9781450396141
DOI:10.1145/3505253
Permission to make digital or hard copies of all or part of this work for personal or classroom use is granted without fee provided that copies are not made or distributed for profit or commercial advantage and that copies bear this notice and the full citation on the first page. Copyrights for components of this work owned by others than ACM must be honored. Abstracting with credit is permitted. To copy otherwise, or republish, to post on servers or to redistribute to lists, requires prior specific permission and/or a fee. Request permissions from [email protected]

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Association for Computing Machinery

New York, NY, United States

Publication History

Published: 04 June 2022

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Author Tags

  1. CX gate
  2. Obfuscation
  3. Quantum Circuit
  4. Total Variation Distance

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HASP '21

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Overall Acceptance Rate 9 of 13 submissions, 69%

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Cited By

View all
  • (2024)Trustworthy and reliable computing using untrusted and unreliable quantum hardwareFrontiers in Computer Science10.3389/fcomp.2024.14317886Online publication date: 26-Aug-2024
  • (2024)Stealthy SWAPs: Adversarial SWAP Injection in Multi-Tenant Quantum Computing2024 37th International Conference on VLSI Design and 2024 23rd International Conference on Embedded Systems (VLSID)10.1109/VLSID60093.2024.00085(474-479)Online publication date: 6-Jan-2024
  • (2024)NISQ Quantum Computing: A Security-Centric Tutorial and Survey [Feature]IEEE Circuits and Systems Magazine10.1109/MCAS.2024.334966524:1(14-32)Online publication date: Sep-2025
  • (2024)Trojan Taxonomy in Quantum Computing2024 IEEE Computer Society Annual Symposium on VLSI (ISVLSI)10.1109/ISVLSI61997.2024.00123(644-649)Online publication date: 1-Jul-2024
  • (2024)Trojan Attacks on Variational Quantum Circuits and Countermeasures2024 25th International Symposium on Quality Electronic Design (ISQED)10.1109/ISQED60706.2024.10528776(1-8)Online publication date: 3-Apr-2024
  • (2024)Obfuscating Quantum Hybrid-Classical Algorithms for Security and Privacy2024 25th International Symposium on Quality Electronic Design (ISQED)10.1109/ISQED60706.2024.10528769(1-8)Online publication date: 3-Apr-2024
  • (2024)Hardware Trojans in Quantum Circuits, Their Impacts, and Defense2024 25th International Symposium on Quality Electronic Design (ISQED)10.1109/ISQED60706.2024.10528740(1-8)Online publication date: 3-Apr-2024
  • (2024)QuantumLeak: Stealing Quantum Neural Networks from Cloud-based NISQ Machines2024 International Joint Conference on Neural Networks (IJCNN)10.1109/IJCNN60899.2024.10651540(1-8)Online publication date: 30-Jun-2024
  • (2024)Quantum Machine Learning of Bigdata Set Using Randomized Measurements2024 7th International Conference on Circuit Power and Computing Technologies (ICCPCT)10.1109/ICCPCT61902.2024.10673223(32-35)Online publication date: 8-Aug-2024
  • (2024)Introduction to Quantum Systems and Security Vulnerabilities2024 IEEE 21st Consumer Communications & Networking Conference (CCNC)10.1109/CCNC51664.2024.10454809(345-351)Online publication date: 6-Jan-2024
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