A team from Yale University has identified a new threat to quantum circuits – power trace attacks. The researchers, Ferhat Erata, Chuanqi Xu, Ruzica Piskac, and Jakub Szefer, have demonstrated how power traces can unlock and steal quantum circuit secrets. Power trace attacks involve gaining access to power traces, which can reveal information about the control pulses sent to quantum computers. The team introduced two new types of single trace attacks and evaluated their effectiveness on 32 real benchmark quantum circuits. The findings highlight the need for new security measures to protect quantum circuits.
Quantum Circuit Security and Power Trace Attacks
The field of quantum computing has seen rapid growth in recent years, leading to an increased focus on securing quantum circuits. A new type of threat to quantum circuits has been identified – power trace attacks. This paper, authored by Ferhat Erata, Chuanqi Xu, Ruzica Piskac, and Jakub Szefer from Yale University, presents the first formalization and demonstration of using power traces to unlock and steal quantum circuit secrets.
Power Trace Attacks: An Overview
Power trace attacks involve attackers gaining access to power traces, which can reveal information about the control pulses sent to quantum computers. From these control pulses, the gate-level description of the circuits and, eventually, the secret algorithms can be reverse-engineered. The paper demonstrates how and what information could be recovered using algebraic reconstruction from power traces.
Types of Power Trace Attacks
The paper introduces two new types of single-trace attacks: per-channel and total power attacks. The former attack relies on per-channel measurements to perform a brute-force attack to reconstruct the quantum circuits. The latter attack performs a single-trace attack using Mixed-Integer Linear Programming optimization.
Effectiveness of Power Trace Attacks
The effectiveness of these attacks was evaluated on 32 real benchmark quantum circuits. The results showed that the technique is highly effective at reconstructing quantum circuits. The findings demonstrate the potential of these attacks and highlight the need to develop new means to protect quantum circuits from power trace attacks.
Quantum Computing and Cloud-Based Systems
The interest in quantum computing is growing rapidly, and many quantum computers are easily accessible to researchers and everyday users over the internet. Due to the expensive nature of the quantum computing equipment, these computers are currently available as cloud-based systems. Companies like IBM Quantum, Amazon Braket, and Microsoft Azure already provide access to various Noisy Intermediate-Scale Quantum (NISQ) devices from different vendors.
Threats to Quantum Computers
While cloud-based quantum computing systems offer convenience, they also present security risks. Malicious insiders within data centers or cloud computing facilities may have physical access to quantum computer equipment. With access to the quantum computers and the microwave controllers, these insiders could leverage physically collected information to steal or leak the quantum circuit secrets.
Power Side-Channel Attacks on Quantum Computers
Power side-channel attacks are a well-known threat to classical computers. These attacks involve establishing a correlation between the power consumption and the operations and data that the circuit executes. This paper shows how a malicious attacker can reconstruct a secret quantum circuit that is being executed by simply measuring the power consumption.
This article Quantum Circuit Reconstruction from Power Side-Channel Attacks on Quantum Computer Controllers, authored by Ferhat Erata, Changqing Xu, Ružica Piskač, and Jakub Szefer, was published on January 28, 2024. The research focuses on the reconstruction of quantum circuits from power side-channel attacks on quantum computer controllers. The article was sourced from arXiv, a repository of electronic preprints approved for publication after moderation, hosted by Cornell University.
