Design of Quantum Computer Antivirus

The development of quantum computers has been advancing rapidly in recent years. In addition to researchers and companies building bigger and bigger machines, these computers are already being actively connected to the internet and offered as cloud-based quantum computer services. As quantum computers become more widely accessible, potentially malicious users could try to execute their code on the machines to leak information from other users, to interfere with or manipulate results of other users, or to reverse engineer the underlying quantum computer architecture and its intellectual property, for example. To analyze such new security threats to cloud-based quantum computers, this work first proposes and explores different types of quantum computer viruses. This work shows that quantum viruses can impact outcomes of Grover’s search algorithm or machine learning classification algorithms running on quantum computers, for example. The work then proposes a first of its kind quantum computer antivirus as a new means of protecting the expensive and fragile quantum computer hardware from quantum computer viruses. The antivirus can analyze quantum computer programs, also called circuits, and detect possibly malicious ones before they execute on quantum computer hardware. As a compile-time technique, it does not introduce any new overhead at run-time of the quantum computer.

I. Introduction

Quantum computing is an exciting new paradigm of computation that offers the potential to solve problems which are intractable on classical digital computers, e.g., integer factorization using Shor’s Algorithm [1]. To realize this potential, researchers worldwide are racing to build bigger and bigger quantum computers. Already, 127-qubit quantum computers are available [2], and IBM, one of the quantum computing vendors, has projected to build 1000-qubit computers by 2023 [3]. Similar projections about upcoming quantum computer sizes have been made by others [4] as well. In addition to increasing sizes, these machines are now easily accessible to anybody through IBM Quantum or other similar cloud-based services such as Amazon Braket or Microsoft Azure.