Challenges
Datasets
Workspaces
Papers
Discussions
Leaderboard
Log inSign up
Challenges
Datasets
Workspaces
Papers
Discussions
Leaderboard
Blog
Job Board
Q3AS

© 2026 Aqora Quantum S.A.S.

TermsPrivacyLegal Notice

arXiv:2504.10193 · IEEE International Conference on Quantum Computing and Engineering (QCE)

A Piece of QAICCC: Towards a Countermeasure Against Crosstalk Attacks in Quantum Servers

Yoann Marquer, Domenico Bianculli

Published Aug 30, 2025• 1 citation
arXivHTMLPDF

Abstract

Quantum computing, while allowing for processing information exponentially faster than classical computing, is far from becoming a personal commodity. Indeed, because of cost and needs for ultra-cold temperature, shielded environment, and complex wiring for control, access to quantum computers is likely to be provided remotely, through quantum servers. Sharing quantum hardware between multiple users enables the efficient use of quantum resources, but makes some security threats possible. For instance, previous studies demonstrated that crosstalk between attacker and victim's qubits can be exploited to mount security attacks. In this work, we address the problem of securing user circuits submitted to quantum servers. We propose the Qubit Allocation for Inter-Circuit Crosstalk Countermeasure (QAICCC), which aims to maximize qubit usage, reduce inter-circuit crosstalk as well as intra-circuit noise. QAICCC performs (1) a crosstalk analysis of the targeted quantum processor to determine qubits involved in crosstalk with the largest intensity; (2) the allocation of qubits in the safest possible way; and (3) the application of existing techniques to further reduce crosstalk between circuits and noise in user circuits. The main contribution is the allocation algorithm, which aims to maximize qubit usage (including making unused qubits available for future usage) while minimizing the largest inter-circuit crosstalk error rate. Thus, QAICCC will support quantum computing adoption by securing the usage of quantum servers by a large number of actors.

DOI
10.1109/qce65121.2025.10434

Related papers

Towards an Antivirus for Quantum Computers

Sanjay R. Deshpande, Chuanqi Xu, Theodoros Trochatos +2 more

Researchers are today exploring models for cloud-based usage of quantum computers where multi-tenancy can be used to share quantum computer hard-ware among multiple users. Multi-tenancy has a promise of allowing better utilization of the quantum computer hardware, but also opens up the quantum computer to new types of security attacks. As this and other recent research shows, it is possible to perform a fault injection attack using crosstalk on quantum computers when a victim and attacker circuits are instantiated as co-tenants on the same quantum computer. To ensure such attacks do not happen, this paper proposes that new techniques should be developed to help catch malicious circuits before they are loaded onto quantum computer hardware. Following ideas from classical computers, a compile-time technique can be designed to scan quantum computer programs for mali-cious or suspicious code patterns before they are compiled into quantum circuits that run on a quantum computer. This paper presents ongoing work which demonstrates how crosstalk can affect Grover's algorithm, and then presents suggestions of how quantum programs could be analyzed to catch circuits that generate large amounts of crosstalk with malicious intent.

arXiv:2203.02649•IEEE International Symposium on Hardware Oriented Security and Trust (HOST)•Jun 27, 2022•22 citations

Crosstalk Attacks and Defence in a Shared Quantum Computing Environment

Benjamin Harper, Behnam Tonekaboni, Bahar Goldozian +2 more

Abstract Quantum computing has the potential to provide solutions to problems that are intractable on classical computers, but the accuracy of the current generation of quantum computers suffer from the impact of noise or errors such as leakage, crosstalk, dephasing, and amplitude damping among others. As the access to quantum computers is almost exclusively in a shared environment through cloud‐based services, it is possible that an adversary can exploit crosstalk noise to disrupt quantum computations on nearby qubits, even carefully designing quantum circuits to purposely lead to wrong answers. In this study, the extent and characteristics of crosstalk noise are studied through tomography conducted on IBM Quantum computers, leading to an enhanced crosstalk simulation model. These results indicate that crosstalk noise is a significant source of errors on IBM quantum hardware, making crosstalk based attack a viable threat to quantum computing in a shared environment. Based on the crosstalk simulator benchmarked against IBM hardware, the impact of crosstalk attacks and develop strategies are assessed for mitigating crosstalk effects. Through a systematic set of simulations, the effectiveness of three crosstalk attack mitigation strategies is assessed, namely circuit separation, qubit allocation optimization via reinforcement learning, and the use of spectator qubits, and show that they all overcome crosstalk attack risk with varying degrees of success and help to secure quantum computing in a shared platform.

arXiv:2402.02753•Advanced Quantum Technologies•Aug 3, 2025•17 citations

QubitVise: Double-Sided Crosstalk Attack in Superconducting Quantum Computers

Adriana Aranguren Arellano, He Xie, Jakub M. Szefer

This work presents a novel security attack based on CNOT gate induced crosstalk in superconducting qubit systems. Compared to previous work, this work introduces a double-sided crosstalk attack where attacker's circuits are located on either side of the victim circuit executing in a multi-tenant cloud-based quantum computer. The attacker, a malicious tenant or user, can interfere with, or disrupt, the state of neighboring qubits in the victim tenant or user without direct access to victim's qubits, by taking advantage of interference and crosstalk among the otherwise logically isolated qubits. New aspect of this attack is the location of the attacker's circuits on both sides of the victim. Experimental validation on cloud-based Rigetti quantum devices demonstrates that these attacks can compromise data integrity and cause the victim's circuit's outputs to change. Magnitude of the change is evaluated using total variational distance and tested on number of common benchmarks that can execute on today's quantum computers. This work underscores the need for improved isolation mechanisms and secure scheduling in multitenant quantum computing cloud environments.

IEEE International Conference on Quantum Computing and Engineering (QCE)•Aug 30, 2025•0 citations

A Primer on Security of Quantum Computing Hardware

Swaroop Ghosh, Suryansh Upadhyay, Abdullah Ash Saki

Quantum computing (QC) is an emerging paradigm with the potential to transform numerous application domains by addressing classically intractable problems. However, its growing presence in cyberspace has introduced new security and privacy challenges. Similar to classical computing systems, the QC stack including software and hardware relies extensively on third parties, many of which are emerging and trust-seeking or less-trusted. This stack often contains sensitive intellectual property (IP) that demands protection. Unique features of quantum systems can enable classical-style attacks: for instance, crosstalk in multitenant settings can facilitate fault-injection attacks, while malicious calibration services can misreport error rates or miscalibrate qubits to induce denial-of-service (DoS) conditions. Given the high cost and limited availability of likely trustworthy quantum hardware, users may be enticed to explore emerging and trust-seeking but cheaper and readily available quantum hardware, which can enable the stealth of IP and tampering of quantum programs and/or computation outcomes. Similarly, emerging compilation services may compromise circuit confidentiality or insert Trojans. Despite the strategic significance of QC and its potential to process sensitive information, its security and privacy concerns remain underexplored. This article presents a comprehensive overview of QC fundamentals, key vulnerabilities, recent attack vectors, and corresponding defenses, and concludes with directions for future research to strengthen the quantum security community.

arXiv:2305.02505•Proceedings of the IEEE•Jul 1, 2025•6 citations

Pulse-Level Simulation of Crosstalk Attacks on Superconducting Quantum Hardware

Syed Emad Uddin Shubha, Tasnuva Farheen

Hardware crosstalk in multi-tenant superconducting quantum computers poses a severe security threat, allowing adversaries to induce targeted errors across tenant boundaries by injecting carefully engineered pulses. We present a simulation-based study of active crosstalk attacks at the pulse level, analyzing how adversarial control of pulse timing, shape, amplitude, and coupling can disrupt a victim's computation. Our framework models the time-dependent dynamics of a three-qubit system in the rotating frame, capturing both always-on couplings and injected drive pulses. We examine two attack strategies: attacker-first (pulse before victim operation) and victim-first (pulse after), and systematically identify the pulse and coupling configurations that cause the largest logical errors. Protocol-level experiments on quantum coin flip and XOR classification circuits show that some protocols are highly vulnerable to these attacks, while others remain robust. Based on these findings, we discuss practical methods for detection and mitigation to improve security in quantum cloud platforms.

arXiv:2507.16181•IEEE International Conference on Quantum Computing and Engineering (QCE)•Aug 30, 2025•1 citation

Addressing Vulnerabilities and Opacities in Quantum Service Providers

Rupshali Roy

There is a steady growth in research and demand for real quan- tum hardware in the Noisy Intermediate-Scale Quantum (NISQ) era of quantum computing. This prompts many third-party cloud providers to set up quantum hardware as a service that includes a wide range of qubit technologies and architectures to maximize performance at minimal cost. Quantum circuits submitted to these services are the fruits of the efforts invested by the designers. But these third-party cloud compilers (who offer more efficient alter- natives to established compilers) can make user circuits/programs vulnerable to various security breaches. Communication channels for transmitting quantum information also need to be developed such that there is end to end encryption. There is little to no visibil- ity on where the execution of the circuit is actually taking place. The success of the user program is highly reliant on the backend that was used for execution. Besides, the third-party provider and/or tools (e.g., hardware mapper and allocator) may be untrustworthy and execute the quantum circuits on less efficient and more error- prone hardware to conserve resources and maximize profit. These vulnerabilities in the quantum system could leak confidential data, cause loss of intellectual property rights of designers, cause loss of access control, corrupt user programs et cetera. Thus, it is imper- ative to identify these security vulnerabilities and create defense strategies to protect quantum programs, thus helping to maintain the integrity of quantum information across the software stack. My thesis aims to help address these vulnerabilities and opacities and address them.

ACM SIGSAC Conference on Computer and Communications Security (CCS)•Nov 19, 2025•1 citation
Quantum computing, while allowing for processing information exponentially faster than classical computing, is far from becoming a personal commodity. Indeed, because of cost and needs for ultra-cold temperature, shielded environment, and complex wiring for control, access to quantum computers is likely to be provided remotely, through quantum servers. Sharing quantum hardware between multiple users enables the efficient use of quantum resources, but makes some security threats possible. For instance, previous studies demonstrated that crosstalk between attacker and victim's qubits can be exploited to mount security attacks. In this work, we address the problem of securing user circuits submitted to quantum servers. We propose the Qubit Allocation for Inter-Circuit Crosstalk Countermeasure (QAICCC), which aims to maximize qubit usage, reduce inter-circuit crosstalk as well as intra-circuit noise. QAICCC performs (1) a crosstalk analysis of the targeted quantum processor to determine qubits involved in crosstalk with the largest intensity; (2) the allocation of qubits in the safest possible way; and (3) the application of existing techniques to further reduce crosstalk between circuits and noise in user circuits. The main contribution is the allocation algorithm, which aims to maximize qubit usage (including making unused qubits available for future usage) while minimizing the largest inter-circuit crosstalk error rate. Thus, QAICCC will support quantum computing adoption by securing the usage of quantum servers by a large number of actors.
Researchers are today exploring models for cloud-based usage of quantum computers where multi-tenancy can be used to share quantum computer hard-ware among multiple users. Multi-tenancy has a promise of allowing better utilization of the quantum computer hardware, but also opens up the quantum computer to new types of security attacks. As this and other recent research shows, it is possible to perform a fault injection attack using crosstalk on quantum computers when a victim and attacker circuits are instantiated as co-tenants on the same quantum computer. To ensure such attacks do not happen, this paper proposes that new techniques should be developed to help catch malicious circuits before they are loaded onto quantum computer hardware. Following ideas from classical computers, a compile-time technique can be designed to scan quantum computer programs for mali-cious or suspicious code patterns before they are compiled into quantum circuits that run on a quantum computer. This paper presents ongoing work which demonstrates how crosstalk can affect Grover's algorithm, and then presents suggestions of how quantum programs could be analyzed to catch circuits that generate large amounts of crosstalk with malicious intent.
Abstract Quantum computing has the potential to provide solutions to problems that are intractable on classical computers, but the accuracy of the current generation of quantum computers suffer from the impact of noise or errors such as leakage, crosstalk, dephasing, and amplitude damping among others. As the access to quantum computers is almost exclusively in a shared environment through cloud‐based services, it is possible that an adversary can exploit crosstalk noise to disrupt quantum computations on nearby qubits, even carefully designing quantum circuits to purposely lead to wrong answers. In this study, the extent and characteristics of crosstalk noise are studied through tomography conducted on IBM Quantum computers, leading to an enhanced crosstalk simulation model. These results indicate that crosstalk noise is a significant source of errors on IBM quantum hardware, making crosstalk based attack a viable threat to quantum computing in a shared environment. Based on the crosstalk simulator benchmarked against IBM hardware, the impact of crosstalk attacks and develop strategies are assessed for mitigating crosstalk effects. Through a systematic set of simulations, the effectiveness of three crosstalk attack mitigation strategies is assessed, namely circuit separation, qubit allocation optimization via reinforcement learning, and the use of spectator qubits, and show that they all overcome crosstalk attack risk with varying degrees of success and help to secure quantum computing in a shared platform.
This work presents a novel security attack based on CNOT gate induced crosstalk in superconducting qubit systems. Compared to previous work, this work introduces a double-sided crosstalk attack where attacker's circuits are located on either side of the victim circuit executing in a multi-tenant cloud-based quantum computer. The attacker, a malicious tenant or user, can interfere with, or disrupt, the state of neighboring qubits in the victim tenant or user without direct access to victim's qubits, by taking advantage of interference and crosstalk among the otherwise logically isolated qubits. New aspect of this attack is the location of the attacker's circuits on both sides of the victim. Experimental validation on cloud-based Rigetti quantum devices demonstrates that these attacks can compromise data integrity and cause the victim's circuit's outputs to change. Magnitude of the change is evaluated using total variational distance and tested on number of common benchmarks that can execute on today's quantum computers. This work underscores the need for improved isolation mechanisms and secure scheduling in multitenant quantum computing cloud environments.
Quantum computing (QC) is an emerging paradigm with the potential to transform numerous application domains by addressing classically intractable problems. However, its growing presence in cyberspace has introduced new security and privacy challenges. Similar to classical computing systems, the QC stack including software and hardware relies extensively on third parties, many of which are emerging and trust-seeking or less-trusted. This stack often contains sensitive intellectual property (IP) that demands protection. Unique features of quantum systems can enable classical-style attacks: for instance, crosstalk in multitenant settings can facilitate fault-injection attacks, while malicious calibration services can misreport error rates or miscalibrate qubits to induce denial-of-service (DoS) conditions. Given the high cost and limited availability of likely trustworthy quantum hardware, users may be enticed to explore emerging and trust-seeking but cheaper and readily available quantum hardware, which can enable the stealth of IP and tampering of quantum programs and/or computation outcomes. Similarly, emerging compilation services may compromise circuit confidentiality or insert Trojans. Despite the strategic significance of QC and its potential to process sensitive information, its security and privacy concerns remain underexplored. This article presents a comprehensive overview of QC fundamentals, key vulnerabilities, recent attack vectors, and corresponding defenses, and concludes with directions for future research to strengthen the quantum security community.
Hardware crosstalk in multi-tenant superconducting quantum computers poses a severe security threat, allowing adversaries to induce targeted errors across tenant boundaries by injecting carefully engineered pulses. We present a simulation-based study of active crosstalk attacks at the pulse level, analyzing how adversarial control of pulse timing, shape, amplitude, and coupling can disrupt a victim's computation. Our framework models the time-dependent dynamics of a three-qubit system in the rotating frame, capturing both always-on couplings and injected drive pulses. We examine two attack strategies: attacker-first (pulse before victim operation) and victim-first (pulse after), and systematically identify the pulse and coupling configurations that cause the largest logical errors. Protocol-level experiments on quantum coin flip and XOR classification circuits show that some protocols are highly vulnerable to these attacks, while others remain robust. Based on these findings, we discuss practical methods for detection and mitigation to improve security in quantum cloud platforms.
There is a steady growth in research and demand for real quan- tum hardware in the Noisy Intermediate-Scale Quantum (NISQ) era of quantum computing. This prompts many third-party cloud providers to set up quantum hardware as a service that includes a wide range of qubit technologies and architectures to maximize performance at minimal cost. Quantum circuits submitted to these services are the fruits of the efforts invested by the designers. But these third-party cloud compilers (who offer more efficient alter- natives to established compilers) can make user circuits/programs vulnerable to various security breaches. Communication channels for transmitting quantum information also need to be developed such that there is end to end encryption. There is little to no visibil- ity on where the execution of the circuit is actually taking place. The success of the user program is highly reliant on the backend that was used for execution. Besides, the third-party provider and/or tools (e.g., hardware mapper and allocator) may be untrustworthy and execute the quantum circuits on less efficient and more error- prone hardware to conserve resources and maximize profit. These vulnerabilities in the quantum system could leak confidential data, cause loss of intellectual property rights of designers, cause loss of access control, corrupt user programs et cetera. Thus, it is imper- ative to identify these security vulnerabilities and create defense strategies to protect quantum programs, thus helping to maintain the integrity of quantum information across the software stack. My thesis aims to help address these vulnerabilities and opacities and address them.