With the growing reliance on cloud-based quantum computing, ensuring the confidentiality and integrity of quantum computations is paramount. Quantum Trusted Execution Environments (QTEEs) have been proposed to protect users' quantum circuits when they are submitted to remote cloud-based quantum computers. However, deployment of QTEEs necessitates a Quantum Operating Systems (QOS) that can support QTEEs hardware and operation. This work introduces the first architecture for a QOS to support and enable essential steps required for secure quantum task execution on cloud platforms.
With the growing reliance on cloud-based quantum computing, ensuring the confidentiality and integrity of quantum computations is paramount. Quantum Trusted Execution Environments (QTEEs) have been proposed to protect users' quantum circuits when they are submitted to remote cloud-based quantum computers. However, deployment of QTEEs necessitates a Quantum Operating Systems (QOS) that can support QTEEs hardware and operation. This work introduces the first architecture for a QOS to support and enable essential steps required for secure quantum task execution on cloud platforms.
The cloud-based environments in which today's and future quantum computers will operate raise concerns about the security and privacy of user's intellectual property, whether code, or data, or both. Without dedicated security protections, quantum circuits submitted to cloud-based quantum computer providers could be accessed by the cloud provider, or malicious insiders working in the cloud provider's data centers. Furthermore, data embedded in these circuits can similarly be accessed as it is encoded using quantum gates inside the circuit. This study presents various hardware and architecture modifications that could be deployed in today's quantum computers, based on superconducting qubits, to protect both the code and data from potentially untrusted quantum computer providers or malicious insiders. Motivated by existing Trusted Execution Environments (TEEs) in classical computers, this study introduces the notion of Quantum Trusted Execution Environments (QTEEs) which leverage trusted hardware to hide or obfuscate quantum circuits executing on a remote, cloud-based quantum computer. This study presents multiple, different approaches to design of QTEEs and considers both hardware and architecture, as well as system software and operating system support necessary for realization of QTEEs. Overall, this study presents three hardware architectures, namely, QC-TEE, SoteriaQ, and CASQUE, that have been designed to protect users' circuits and data from potential threats originating from both malicious quantum computer cloud providers or insider attackers. This study further outlines a roadmap for other possible QTEEs that can be developed in the future, to account for different threat models or to support different types of quantum computer architectures.
Cloud-based quantum computingQuantum Computing (QC) introduces significant security and privacy risks to users’ intellectual property, including both program code and input data. In the absence of dedicated protections, quantum circuits submitted to remote services may be accessible to the cloud provider or compromised by malicious insiders. Furthermore, data embedded in these circuits remains susceptible to leakage during execution. This work proposes architectural and hardware enhancements for contemporary superconducting-qubit quantum computers to mitigate such threats. Drawing inspiration from classical Trusted Execution EnvironmentsTrusted Execution Environments (TEE) (TEEs), we define Quantum Trusted Execution EnvironmentsTrusted Execution Environments (TEE) (QTEEs): trusted hardware mechanisms designed to conceal or obfuscate quantum programs in cloud settings. We present two concrete instantiations, SoteriaQ and CASQUE, detailing their hardware support and required system software.
We present the first architecture for a trusted execution environment for quantum computers. In the architecture, to protect the user's circuits, they are obfuscated with decoy control pulses added during circuit transpilation by the user. The decoy pulses are removed, i.e. attenuated, by the trusted hardware inside the superconducting quantum computer's fridge before they reach the qubits. This preliminary work demonstrates that protection from possibly malicious cloud providers is feasible with minimal hardware cost.
The cloud-based environments in which today's and future quantum computers will operate, raise concerns about the security and privacy of user's intellectual property. Quantum circuits submitted to cloud-based quantum computer providers represent sensitive or proprietary algorithms developed by users that need protection. Further, input data is hard-coded into the circuits, and leakage of the circuits can expose users' data. To help protect users' circuits and data from possibly malicious quantum computer cloud providers, this work presented the first hardware architecture for a trusted execution environment for quantum computers. To protect the user's circuits and data, the quantum computer control pulses are obfuscated with decoy control pulses. While digital data can be encrypted, analog control pulses cannot and this paper proposed the novel decoy pulse approach to obfuscate the analog control pulses. The proposed decoy pulses can easily be added to the software by users. Meanwhile, the hardware components of the architecture proposed in this paper take care of eliminating, i.e. attenuating, the decoy pulses inside the superconducting quantum computer's dilution refrigerator before they reach the qubits. The hardware architecture also contains tamper-resistant features to protect the trusted hardware and users' information. The work leverages a new metric of variational distance to analyze the impact and scalability of hardware protection. The variational distance of the circuits protected with our scheme, compared to unprotected circuits, is in the range of only 0.16 to 0.26. This work demonstrates that protection from possibly malicious cloud providers is feasible and all the hardware components needed for the proposed architecture are available today.
Rapidly evolving research on quantum computers brings closer reality of practical quantum computers that can solve previously untractable problems. However, as these computers become more powerful, they will process and generate valuable data and intellectual property, making them targets of security attacks. As a result, there is a need to develop architectures for securing quantum computers and the computation. This work presents emerging ideas on design of a trusted quantum computer controller as a pivotal component in securing quantum computing systems. At its core, a trusted controller acts to protect the privacy and security of user's circuits executing on the quantum computer itself. In this work, the classical controller used to generate control pulses for quantum computers is augmented with trusted hardware. The trusted classical hardware can analyze and manipulate circuits and instructions before generating control pulses sent to the untrusted, quantum processing unit. This work analyzes the promises of trusted controller and presents ideas for design of secure cloud-based quantum computers.
Abstract: This study investigates how secure computation can remain trustworthy during the post-quantum transition, in which large-scale quantum computation threatens the public-key primitives used for key exchange, authentication, and software trust. The analysis treats quantum readiness as a systems property rather than a cryptographic substitution exercise. In practical deployments, cryptographic migrations change protocol sizes and performance characteristics, while cloud execution substrates introduce privileged attack surfaces that can expose data despite formally strong cryptography. A unified architecture is proposed that couples standardised post-quantum cryptography (PQC) for key establishment and digital signatures with confidential cloud execution (hardware-backed isolation and remote attestation) and with policy-grade auditability implemented via policy-as-code plus cryptographic provenance. The evaluation uses real, published parameter sizes from standardised PQC algorithms and real published performance measurements for trusted execution environments to quantify bandwidth overhead, handshake expansion, and the capacity impact of protected execution. The results show that PQC adoption can introduce substantial protocol-layer size expansion, with digital signature payloads frequently dominating bandwidth budgets relative to key encapsulation. Hybrid deployment profiles increase overhead further because classical and post-quantum materials are transmitted together, supporting staged rollouts with explicit deprecation timelines. Confidential computing reduces exposure to compromised hypervisors but imposes workload-sensitive overheads, motivating selective isolation of high-value computations combined with continuous, evidence-centric governance. Keywords post-quantum cryptography; confidential computing; trusted execution environments; policy-as-code; auditability; attestation; cryptographic agility; compliance; secure computation; zero trust.