Exploration of Quantum Computer Power Side-Channels

Noisy Intermediate-Scale Quantum (NISQ) quantum computers are being rapidly improved, with bigger numbers of qubits and improved fidelity. The rapidly increasing qubit counts and improving the fidelity of quantum computers will enable novel algorithms to be executed on the quantum computers, and generate novel results and data whose intellectual property will be a highly-guarded secret. At the same time, quantum computers are likely to remain specialized machines, and many will be controlled and maintained in a remote, cloud-based environment where end users who want to come up with novel algorithms have no control over the physical space. Lack of physical control by users means that physical attacks could be possible, by malicious insiders in the data center, for example. This work shows for the first time that power-based side-channel attacks could be deployed against quantum computers. The attacks could be used to recover information about the control pulses sent to quantum computers. From the control pulses, the gate level description of the circuits, and eventually the secret algorithms can be reverse engineered. This work demonstrates how and what information could be recovered, and then in turn how to defend from power-based side-channels. Real control pulse information from real quantum computers is used to demonstrate potential power-based side-channel attacks. Meanwhile, proposed defenses can be deployed already today, without hardware changes.