Pulse-to-Circuit Characterization of Stealthy Crosstalk Attack on Multi-Tenant Superconducting Quantum Hardware

2025-09-14

AI Summary

Hardware crosstalk in multi-tenant superconducting quantum computers poses a cross-tenant covert security threat. This paper proposes the first end-to-end pulse-to-circuit mapping framework that establishes an interpretable model linking physical-layer drive/catalyst-qubit asymmetric crosstalk mechanisms to logical-level error channels. We innovatively introduce isometric transformations for automatic logical circuit extraction and integrate density matrix simulation with quantum process tomography (QPT) to construct a verifiable error channel model. Furthermore, we design a protocol-layer detection strategy based on observable features. Evaluation on a three-qubit system demonstrates that the attack reduces protocol accuracy to 50%—the random-guess baseline—while maintaining high stealth under realistic hardware parameter fluctuations. Our detection scheme effectively identifies attack signatures.

Technology Category

• Machine Learning: Quantum Machine Learning
• Computer Vision: Adversarial Attacks & Robustness
• Search and Optimization: Learning to Search

Application Category

• Security and Privacy: Large-scale security measurements
• User Modeling, Personalization and Recommendation: Attacks and countermeasures in recommendation systems
• Economics, Online Markets and Human Computation: LLM based quality controls for crowd work

Abstract

Hardware crosstalk in multi-tenant superconducting quantum computers constitutes a significant security threat, enabling adversaries to inject targeted errors across tenant boundaries. We present the first end-to-end framework for mapping physical pulse-level attacks to interpretable logical error channels, integrating density-matrix simulation, quantum process tomography (QPT), and a novel isometry-based circuit extraction method. Our pipeline reconstructs the complete induced error channel and fits an effective logical circuit model, revealing a fundamentally asymmetric attack mechanism: one adversarial qubit acts as a driver to set the induced logical rotation, while a second, the catalyst, refines the attack's coherence. Demonstrated on a linear three-qubit system, our approach shows that such attacks can significantly disrupt diverse quantum protocols, sometimes reducing accuracy to random guessing, while remaining effective and stealthy even under realistic hardware parameter variations. We further propose a protocol-level detection strategy based on observable attack signatures, showing that stealthy attacks can be exposed through targeted monitoring and providing a foundation for future defense-in-depth in quantum cloud platforms.

Problem

• Characterizing stealthy crosstalk attacks on multi-tenant quantum hardware
• Mapping physical pulse-level attacks to logical error channels
• Developing detection strategies against asymmetric quantum attack mechanisms

Innovation

• Mapping pulse-level attacks to logical errors
• Integrating density-matrix simulation with QPT
• Using isometry-based circuit extraction method