Quantum Speaker Series Presents: Towards Design of Secure Quantum Computers

As quantum computer research continues to advance rapidly, there are advances at all the levels of the quantum computer system stack: from designs of physical qubits to architectures of networked-connected quantum computers. In particular, more and more of quantum computers are becoming available as cloud-based services through IBM Quantum, Amazon Braket, Microsoft Azure, and others. These deployments make quantum computers more easily accessible to anybody, but they also open up the devices to various security threats.  Especially, as qubit counts increase and quantum computers achieve higher levels of fidelity, their potential to execute novel algorithms and generate sensitive intellectual property becomes more promising. However, there is a significant gap in our understanding of the vulnerabilities these computers face in terms of security attacks, both by malicious end-users, but also untrusted cloud providers. The objective of this seminar will be to introduce audience to the recent research on security of quantum computer architectures and hardware, demonstrating recent security attack prototypes, as well as defenses.

The focus of the webinar will be on superconducting qubit quantum computers, however, the security ideas can be applied to other types of quantum computers. One of the goals of the webinar will be as well to motivate discussion about design of secure quantum computers and make connections between the quantum computer and security academic research and industry developers of these machines and systems so that together designs and definitions can be created for secure quantum computers.