Time-Aware Re-Synthesis for Secure Quantum Systems

The demand for reliable quantum computing platforms has led to significant progress in the development of quantum circuit synthesis and compilation methods that map quantum algorithms to the target quantum architecture. In this paper, we show that the synthesis tools can offer opportunities to enhance the security of quantum systems. We propose a time-aware framework for injecting signatures into quantum circuits. We explore different threat models including quantum circuit IP piracy and the unauthorized circuit execution on the quantum hardware. Our proposed framework supports time-aware block/sub-circuit construction and key-based re-synthesis. We validate the effectiveness of our proposed methods using different quantum benchmarks executed on real-world quantum computers. Our results show that our proposed methods are very stealthy for heavily optimized quantum circuits.