The highly specialist terms `quantum computing' and `quantum information', together with the broader term `quantum technologies', now appear regularly in the mainstream media. While this is undoubtedly highly exciting for physicists and investors alike, a key question for society concerns such systems' vulnerabilities -- and in particular, their vulnerability to collective manipulation. Here we present and discuss a new form of vulnerability in such systems, that we have identified based on detailed many-body quantum mechanical calculations. The impact of this new vulnerability is that groups of adversaries can maximally disrupt these systems' global quantum state which will then jeopardize their quantum functionality. It will be almost impossible to detect these attacks since they do not change the Hamiltonian and the purity remains the same; they do not entail any real-time communication between the attackers; and they can last less than a second. We also argue that there can be an implicit amplification of such attacks because of the statistical character of modern non-state actor groups. A countermeasure could be to embed future quantum technologies within redundant classical networks. We purposely structure the discussion in this chapter so that the first sections are self-contained and can be read by non-specialists.

翻译：“量子计算”和“量子信息”这类高度专业化的术语，连同更广义的“量子技术”，如今已频繁出现在主流媒体中。尽管这对物理学家和投资者而言无疑是令人振奋的，但社会面临的一个关键问题在于此类系统的脆弱性——尤其是其面对集体操纵时的脆弱性。本文基于详细的多体量子力学计算，提出并讨论了我们发现的这类系统中的一种新型脆弱性。这种新型脆弱性的影响在于，敌对群体能够最大程度地扰乱这些系统的全局量子态，进而危及它们的量子功能。这些攻击几乎不可能被检测到，因为它们不改变哈密顿量，纯度保持不变；攻击者之间无需任何实时通信；且攻击持续时间可短于一秒。我们还指出，由于现代非国家行为者群体的统计特性，此类攻击可能存在隐性的放大效应。一种应对措施可能是将未来的量子技术嵌入冗余的经典网络中。本章在结构安排上特意使前几节自成一体，便于非专业人员阅读。