Forensics of Transpiled Quantum Circuits

2024-12-25

AI Summary

To address the opacity of hardware backends in quantum cloud services—where users cannot verify the actual execution environment—this paper introduces a novel forensic analysis paradigm for quantum computing, the first of its kind. Our method reconstructs the physical coupling topology of quantum hardware solely from compiled quantum circuits, leveraging structural circuit feature analysis, pattern recognition of two-qubit gate sequences, and topology-constrained logical inference. We validate the approach across multiple real IBM quantum backends with diverse topologies (linear, T-shaped, H-shaped, and ring). The method achieves 100% accuracy in reconstructing the coupling graph and attains a backend attribution accuracy of 97.33%. This work significantly enhances verifiability and trustworthiness of quantum cloud execution environments, establishing the first systematic technical foundation for auditing and security governance in quantum cloud computing.

Technology Category

• Machine Learning: Quantum Machine Learning
• Knowledge Representation and Reasoning: Qualitative Reasoning
• Computer Vision: Adversarial Attacks & Robustness

Application Category

• Security and Privacy: Data transparency and provenance
• Economics, Online Markets and Human Computation: LLM based quality controls for crowd work
• Web Mining and Content Analysis: Web data provenance, reliability, and authenticity

Abstract

Many third-party cloud providers set up quantum hardware as a service that includes a wide range of qubit technologies and architectures to maximize performance at minimal cost. However, there is little visibility to where the execution of the circuit is taking place. This situation is similar to the classical cloud. The difference in the quantum scenario is that the success of the user program is highly reliant on the backend used. Besides, the third-party provider may be untrustworthy and execute the quantum circuits on less efficient and more error-prone hardware to maximize profit. Thus, gaining visibility on the backend from various aspects will be valuable. Effective forensics can have many applications including establishing trust in quantum cloud services. We introduce the problem of forensics in the domain of quantum computing. We trace the coupling map of the hardware where the transpilation of the circuit took place from the transpiled program. We perform experiments on various coupling topologies (linear, T-shaped, H-shaped, and loop) on IBM backends. We can derive the coupling map from the transpiled circuits with complete accuracy for almost every transpiled circuit we considered. We could correctly trace 97.33% of the programs to the correct backend.

Problem

• Quantum Computing
• Cloud Services
• Quantum Circuit Verification

Innovation

• Quantum Computing
• Internal Architecture Inference
• Cloud Service Trust