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Security Evaluation of Quantum Circuit Split Compilation under an Oracle-Guided Attack

Hongyu Zhang, Yuntao Liu

TL;DR

The paper evaluates the security of quantum circuit split compilation against an oracle-guided reverse-engineering attack. It introduces a hierarchical, block-based method that exploits gate reversibility to prune the inter-split search space and recover the hidden wiring with relatively few IO queries, validated on RevLib circuits via IBM Qiskit simulations. Findings show that the attack can reconstruct full interconnections with modest query budgets and that the observed attack complexity tends to scale linearly with Split 2 depth $n$ (and total qubits $m$), rather than following the exponential bound previously claimed. This work highlights a critical need for attack-aware quantum IP protection and provides a reproducible framework for evaluating defenses in practical quantum hardware and simulators.

Abstract

Quantum circuits are the fundamental representation of quantum algorithms and constitute valuable intellectual property (IP). Multiple quantum circuit obfuscation (QCO) techniques have been proposed in prior research to protect quantum circuit IP against malicious compilers. However, there has not been a thorough security evaluation of these schemes. In this work, we investigate the resilience of split compilation against an oracle-guided attack. Split compilation is one of the most studied QCO techniques, where the circuit to be compiled is split into two disjoint partitions. Each split circuit is known to the compiler, but the interconnections between them are hidden. We propose an oracle-guided security evaluation framework in which candidate connections are systematically tested against input-output observations, with iteratively pruned inconsistent mappings. This hierarchical matching process exploits the reversibility of quantum gates and reduces the search space compared to brute-force enumeration. Experimental evaluation in the RevLib benchmark suite shows that only a small number of I/O pairs are sufficient to recover the correct inter-split connections and reconstruct the entire circuits. Our study marks the first thorough security evaluations in quantum IP protection and highlights the necessity of such evaluations in the development of new protection schemes.

Security Evaluation of Quantum Circuit Split Compilation under an Oracle-Guided Attack

TL;DR

The paper evaluates the security of quantum circuit split compilation against an oracle-guided reverse-engineering attack. It introduces a hierarchical, block-based method that exploits gate reversibility to prune the inter-split search space and recover the hidden wiring with relatively few IO queries, validated on RevLib circuits via IBM Qiskit simulations. Findings show that the attack can reconstruct full interconnections with modest query budgets and that the observed attack complexity tends to scale linearly with Split 2 depth (and total qubits ), rather than following the exponential bound previously claimed. This work highlights a critical need for attack-aware quantum IP protection and provides a reproducible framework for evaluating defenses in practical quantum hardware and simulators.

Abstract

Quantum circuits are the fundamental representation of quantum algorithms and constitute valuable intellectual property (IP). Multiple quantum circuit obfuscation (QCO) techniques have been proposed in prior research to protect quantum circuit IP against malicious compilers. However, there has not been a thorough security evaluation of these schemes. In this work, we investigate the resilience of split compilation against an oracle-guided attack. Split compilation is one of the most studied QCO techniques, where the circuit to be compiled is split into two disjoint partitions. Each split circuit is known to the compiler, but the interconnections between them are hidden. We propose an oracle-guided security evaluation framework in which candidate connections are systematically tested against input-output observations, with iteratively pruned inconsistent mappings. This hierarchical matching process exploits the reversibility of quantum gates and reduces the search space compared to brute-force enumeration. Experimental evaluation in the RevLib benchmark suite shows that only a small number of I/O pairs are sufficient to recover the correct inter-split connections and reconstruct the entire circuits. Our study marks the first thorough security evaluations in quantum IP protection and highlights the necessity of such evaluations in the development of new protection schemes.

Paper Structure

This paper contains 19 sections, 2 figures, 1 algorithm.

Table of Contents

  1. Introduction
  2. Background & Related Work
  3. Quantum Computing Fundamentals
  4. Quantum Circuit IP Protection
  5. Reverse Engineering Gap
  6. Threat Models
  7. Connection Recovery under Split Compilation
  8. Problem Setup and Overview
  9. Hierarchical Connection Recovery Method
  10. Separating Qubits in Split 2 using Entanglement Relations
  11. Block-Level Qubit Mapping
  12. Pruning Qubit Mapping Permutations
  13. Accounting for Noise in Oracle Measurement
  14. Advantages Over Brute-Force Search
  15. Experiments and Results
  16. ...and 4 more sections

Figures (2)

  • Figure 1: Flow of the oracle-guided attack model on split compilation. The original circuit is split into Splits 1 and 2 that are compiled separately. The attacker seeks to reverse-engineer the hidden qubit connections through input-output oracle queries on the deployed quantum circuit.
  • Figure 2: The x-axis displays the number of layers in Split 2 ($n$); the y-axis displays the number of matching attempts $t$.