Quantum Circuit Reconstruction from Power Side-Channel Attacks on Quantum Computer Controllers

TL;DR

This work formalizes power side-channel attacks on quantum computer controllers and demonstrates two single-shot reconstruction approaches: a per-channel brute-force method and a total-power MILP/LIRA-based method. By modeling pulse-level circuits, basis pulses, and channel constraints, the authors show that attackers can recover circuit structure from power traces using a Jensen-Shannon distance-based matching or MILP optimization. Extensive evaluation on 32 QASMBench circuits with real IBM pulse data indicates high reconstruction accuracy for X, SX, and CX gates and reveals computation-time growth with circuit size and duration. The results underscore a previously underexplored class of physical threats to quantum-program security and motivate developing defenses such as randomized or constant-power pulse generation to mitigate leakage at the controller level.

Abstract

The interest in quantum computing has grown rapidly in recent years, and with it grows the importance of securing quantum circuits. A novel type of threat to quantum circuits that dedicated attackers could launch are power trace attacks. To address this threat, this paper presents first formalization and demonstration of using power traces to unlock and steal quantum circuit secrets. With access to power traces, attackers can recover information about the control pulses sent to quantum computers. From the control pulses, the gate level description of the circuits, and eventually the secret algorithms can be reverse engineered. This work demonstrates how and what information could be recovered. This work uses algebraic reconstruction from power traces to realize 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. Through the use of algebraic reconstruction, this work demonstrates that quantum circuit secrets can be stolen with high accuracy. Evaluation on 32 real benchmark quantum circuits shows that our technique is highly effective at reconstructing quantum circuits. The findings not only show the veracity of the potential attacks, but also the need to develop new means to protect quantum circuits from power trace attacks. Throughout this work real control pulse information from real quantum computers is used to demonstrate potential attacks based on simulation of collection of power traces.

Figures (11)

• Figure 1: Typical operation of a cloud-based quantum computer. Red arrows highlight potential power trace threats.
• Figure 2: Schematic of a typical qubit drive setup. The local oscillator (LO) generates a low phase-noise microwave carrier signal, and then the wave is modulated in the IQ mixer by I and Q components generated by the arbitrary wave generator (AWG). The pulse is then sent to drive the qubits in the quantum computer. The red line shows the process to collect power traces, which can be exploited by attackers to retrieve information.
• Figure 3: Example SX, X, and CX gate control pulses. Figure from xu2023exploration.
• Figure 4: Example of process for running quantum circuits on superconducting quantum computers in Qiskit.
• Figure 5: A quantum adder circuit with width=4 (4 qubits) followed by measurement.