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.

翻译：近年来，量子计算的关注度迅速增长，随之而来的是保障量子电路安全的重要性日益凸显。一种针对量子电路的新型威胁——功耗轨迹攻击——可能由专门攻击者实施。为应对这一威胁，本文首次形式化并演示了如何利用功耗轨迹解锁并窃取量子电路机密。攻击者通过获取功耗轨迹，可恢复发送至量子计算机的控制脉冲信息。从控制脉冲出发，可逆向工程还原电路的逻辑门级描述，进而最终破译秘密算法。本研究展示了信息恢复的方式与范围，并利用功耗轨迹代数重构实现了两种新型单次轨迹攻击：每通道攻击与总功率攻击。前者依赖每通道测量值通过暴力攻击重构量子电路，后者则采用混合整数线性规划优化进行单次轨迹攻击。通过代数重构，本研究表明量子电路机密可被高精度窃取。在32个真实量子基准电路上的评估显示，我们的技术对重构量子电路具有高效性。研究结果不仅揭示了潜在攻击的真实性，更凸显了开发新手段以保护量子电路免遭功耗轨迹攻击的必要性。本工作全程使用真实量子计算机的控制脉冲信息，基于功耗轨迹采集的仿真来演示潜在攻击。