Quantum Computer Cybersecurity
As Quantum Computer device research continues to advance rapidly, there are also advances at the other levels of the computer system stack that involve these devices. In particular, more and more of the Quantum Computer devices are becoming available as cloud-based services through IBM Quantum, Amazon Braket, Microsoft Azure, and others. In parallel, researchers have put forward ideas about multi-programming of the Quantum Computer devices where single device can be shared by multiple programs, or even multiple users. While all of the advances make the Quantum Computer devices more easily accessible and increase utilization, they open up the devices to various security threats. Especially, with cloud-based access and multi-tenancy, different, remote, and untrusted users could abuse the Quantum Computer devices to leak information from other users using the shared devices, map or learn about the Quantum Computer infrastructure itself, or even possibly try to damage the infrastructure or the devices. This talk will aim to provide some background on security lessons that Computer Architecture and Hardware Security community has learned from the past decades exploring hardware-related security issues in classical computers. It will then motivate the need to think about Quantum Computer cybersecurity now, to make sure that security is first-class objective when designing and deploying these devices in cloud-based settings. The talk will then present recent research on security attacks on Quantum Computer devices in IBM Quantum cloud-based computers, as well as preliminary developments of defensive techniques. The end goal of the presentation is to motivate discussion about Quantum Computer Cybersecurity and make connections between the Quantum Computer research community and the Hardware Security research community.