QPUF 2.0: Exploring Quantum Physical Unclonable Functions for Security-by-Design of Energy Cyber-Physical Systems
Venkata K. V. V. Bathalapalli, Saraju P. Mohanty, Chenyun Pan, Elias Kougianos
TL;DR
The QPUF experimental evaluation in this research shows a robust and reliable extraction of quantum digital fingerprints from noisy IBM quantum systems, with an impressive 86% keys achieving 100% reliability.
Abstract
Sustainable advancement is being made to improve the efficiency of the generation, transmission, and distribution of renewable energy resources, as well as managing them to ensure the reliable operation of the smart grid. Supervisory control and data acquisition (SCADA) enables sustainable management of grid communication flow through its real-time data sensing, processing, and actuation capabilities at various levels in the energy distribution framework. The security vulnerabilities associated with the SCADA-enabled grid infrastructure and management could jeopardize the smart grid operations. This work explores the potential of Quantum Physical Unclonable Functions (QPUF) for the security, privacy, and reliability of the smart grid's energy transmission and distribution framework. Quantum computing has emerged as a formidable security solution for high-performance computing applications through its probabilistic nature of information processing. This work has a quantum hardware-assisted security mechanism based on intrinsic properties of quantum hardware driven by quantum mechanics to provide tamper-proof security for quantum computing driven smart grid infrastructure. This work introduces a novel QPUF architecture using quantum logic gates based on quantum decoherence, entanglement, and superposition. This generates a unique bitstream for each quantum device as a fingerprint. The proposed QPUF design is evaluated on IBM and Google quantum systems and simulators. The deployment on the IBM quantum simulator (ibmq_qasm_simulator) has achieved an average Hamming distance of 50.07%, 51% randomness, and 86% of the keys showing 100% reliability.