This work presents the first thorough exploration of the attacks on the interface between gate-level and pulse-level quantum circuits and pulse-level quantum circuits themselves. Typically, quantum circuits and programs that execute on quantum computers, are defined using gate-level primitives. However, to improve the expressivity of quantum circuits and to allow better optimization, pulse-level circuits are now often used. The attacks presented in this work leverage the inconsistency between the gate-level description of the custom gate, and the actual, low-level pulse implementation of this gate. By manipulating the custom gate specification, this work proposes numerous attacks: qubit plunder, qubit block, qubit reorder, timing mismatch, frequency mismatch, phase mismatch, and waveform mismatch. This work demonstrates these attacks on the real quantum computer and simulator, and shows that most current software development kits are vulnerable to these new types of attacks. In the end, this work proposes a defense framework. The exploration of security and privacy issues of the rising pulse-level quantum circuits provides insight into the future development of secure quantum software development kits and quantum computer systems.

翻译：本研究首次系统性地探究了门级与脉冲级量子电路接口以及脉冲级量子电路本身所面临的安全攻击。通常，在量子计算机上执行的量子电路与程序使用门级原语进行定义。然而，为提高量子电路的表达能力并实现更优的优化，脉冲级电路如今已被广泛采用。本文提出的攻击利用了自定义门在门级描述与其实际底层脉冲实现之间的不一致性。通过操控自定义门的规格定义，本研究提出了多种攻击方式：量子比特窃取、量子比特阻塞、量子比特重排、时序失配、频率失配、相位失配以及波形失配。研究在真实的量子计算机及模拟器上验证了这些攻击，并表明当前大多数软件开发工具包均易受此类新型攻击的影响。最后，本文提出了一个防御框架。对新兴脉冲级量子电路安全与隐私问题的深入探讨，为未来开发安全的量子软件开发工具包及量子计算机系统提供了重要参考。