With the rapidly growing interest in quantum computing also grows the importance of securing these quantum computers from various physical attacks. Constantly increasing qubit counts and improvements to the fidelity of the quantum computers hold great promise for the ability of these computers to run novel algorithms with highly sensitive intellectual property. However, in today's cloud-based quantum computer setting, users lack physical control over the computers. Physical attacks, such as those perpetrated by malicious insiders in data centers, could be used to extract sensitive information about the circuits being executed on these computers. Indeed, this work shows for the first time that power-based side-channel attacks could be deployed against quantum computers. Such attacks can be used to recover information about the control pulses sent to these computers. By analyzing these control pulses, attackers can reverse-engineer the equivalent gate-level description of the circuits, and possibly even the secret algorithms being run. This work introduces five new types of attacks, and evaluates them using control pulse information available from cloud-based quantum computers. This work demonstrates how and what circuits could be recovered, and then in turn how to defend from the newly demonstrated side-channel attacks on quantum~computers.

翻译：随着量子计算领域的迅猛发展，确保量子计算机免受各类物理攻击的重要性与日俱增。量子比特数量的持续增加以及保真度的提升，使这些计算机在运行涉及高度敏感知识产权的创新算法方面展现出巨大潜力。然而，在当前基于云的量子计算环境中，用户缺乏对计算机的物理控制权。诸如数据中心内部恶意人员实施的物理攻击，可能被用于窃取正在这些计算机上执行的电路敏感信息。事实上，本研究首次证实：针对量子计算机的电源侧信道攻击是可行的。此类攻击可用于恢复发送至量子计算机的控制脉冲信息。通过分析这些控制脉冲，攻击者能够逆向推导出电路的等效门级描述，甚至可能还原正在运行的机密算法。本文提出了五种新型攻击手段，并利用云量子计算机提供的控制脉冲信息对其进行评估。研究展示了可恢复的电路类型及其具体方法，进而针对量子计算机上这类新发现的侧信道攻击提出了相应防御策略。