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International Conference on Supercomputing

OpaQue: Program Output Obfuscation for Quantum Software Circuits in Quantum Clouds

Tirthak Patel, Aditya Ranjan, Daniel Silver, Harshitta Gandhi, William Cutler, Devesh Tiwari

Published Jun 8, 2025• 1 citation
Publisher

Abstract

Recent quantum software engineering efforts have made significant progress in testing and debugging quantum algorithms -however, providing confidentiality and privacy to quantum software in the cloud remains an unexplored critical area.OpaQue is the first solution to obfuscate quantum software and output to prevent the leaking of confidential information over the cloud.OpaQue implements a lightweight, scalable, and effective solution based on the unique principles of quantum computing to achieve this task.

DOI
10.1145/3721145.3725771

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Recent quantum software engineering efforts have made significant progress in testing and debugging quantum algorithms -however, providing confidentiality and privacy to quantum software in the cloud remains an unexplored critical area.OpaQue is the first solution to obfuscate quantum software and output to prevent the leaking of confidential information over the cloud.OpaQue implements a lightweight, scalable, and effective solution based on the unique principles of quantum computing to achieve this task.
Quantum computing is an emerging paradigm that has shown great promise in accelerating large-scale scientific, optimization, and machine-learning workloads. With most quantum computing solutions being offered over the cloud, it has become imperative to protect confidential and proprietary quantum code from being accessed by untrusted and/or adversarial agents. In response to this challenge, we propose SPYCE, which is the first known solution to obfuscate quantum code and output to prevent the leaking of any confidential information over the cloud. SPYCE implements a lightweight, scalable, and effective solution based on the unique principles of quantum computing to achieve this task.
The developments in quantum computing hardware and software are focused on boosting the scalability and robustness of quantum systems. With near-term quantum computers poised to accelerate specific computational tasks, ensuring their security has become a pressing priority. Recent efforts have proposed practical solutions to ensure data confidentiality in quantum computers accessed through the cloud, particularly in the presence of untrusted quantum cloud providers by leveraging trusted hardware that enables quantum circuit obfuscation. However, these solutions overlook the detailed structural information of the quantum algorithms, which may limit the effectiveness of the obfuscation methods. In this paper, we investigate the structural constraints of quantum algorithms executed across different quantum architectures. Based on this analysis, we develop a Machine Learning (ML)-based classifier that reveals the underlying quantum algorithm of the obfuscated physical quantum circuit. We also propose a pre-processing phase to minimize the obfuscation's impact on the classifier accuracy. We evaluate our proposed ML-based classification model on different obfuscated physical quantum circuits, which are transpiled to support IBM quantum hardware. Our analysis shows the vulnerability of existing obfuscation methods to reverse engineering attacks, which can potentially expose sensitive information about quantum circuits.
Quantum compilers play a crucial role in quantum computing by converting these algorithmic quantum circuits into forms compatible with specific quantum computer hardware. However, untrusted quantum compilers present considerable risks, including the potential theft of quantum circuit intellectual property (IP) and compromise of the functionality (e.g. Trojan insertion). Quantum circuit obfuscation techniques protect quantum IP by transforming a quantum circuit into a key-dependent version before compilation and restoring the compiled circuit's functionality with the correct key. This prevents the untrusted compiler from knowing the circuit's original functionality. Existing quantum circuit obfuscation techniques focus on inserting key qubits to control key gates. One added key gate can represent at most one Boolean key bit. In this paper, we propose OPAQUE, a phase-based quantum circuit obfuscation approach where we use the angle of rotation gates as the secret keys. The rotation angle is a continuous value, which makes it possible to represent multiple key bits. Moreover, phase gates are usually implemented as virtual gates in quantum hardware, diminishing their cost and impact on accuracy.
We introduce ObfusQate, a novel framework that performs software obfuscation using quantum primitives to enhance the security of both classical and quantum programs. ObfusQate implements eight obfuscation techniques categorized into quantum circuit-level and code-level transformations. Circuit-level obfuscation leverages quantum gates, identity operations, and unitary transformations to construct non-intuitive circuits that resist reverse engineering. Code-level obfuscation employs quantum-based opaque predicates to obscure control flow, making execution paths unpredictable. We evaluate the effectiveness of ObfusQate using three benchmark quantum algorithms: Bernstein-Vazirani, Shor’s, and QAOA. Experiments show that the framework incurs tunable polynomial overhead in both time and space, while preserving functional correctness. Additionally, we demonstrate an offensive use case by embedding a keylogger into Shor’s algorithm. Large language models (GPT-4o, GPT-o3-mini, and Grok-3) successfully identified the payload in the unobfuscated version, but failed when it was obfuscated using ObfusQate. To our knowledge, ObfusQate is the first automated system for quantum software obfuscation. It provides a foundation for secure deployment of quantum software in adversarial and shared environments.
Quantum circuit obfuscation is becoming increasingly important to prevent theft and reverse engineering of quantum algorithms. As quantum computing advances, the need to protect the intellectual property contained in quantum circuits continues to grow. Existing methods often provide limited defense against structural and statistical analysis or introduce considerable overhead. In this paper, we propose a novel quantum obfuscation method that uses randomized U3 transformations to conceal circuit structure while preserving functionality. We implement and assess our approach on QASM circuits using Qiskit AER, achieving over 93\% semantic accuracy with minimal runtime overhead. The method demonstrates strong resistance to reverse engineering and structural inference, making it a practical and effective approach for quantum software protection.
Circuit cutting is a novel technique in the field of quantum computing that offers a promising approach for breaking up large quantum circuits into smaller ones that can be executed on smaller quantum computers. Circuit cutting offers a scalable and hybrid computing approach, by combining classical and quantum computers to run large quantum circuits. At the same time, quantum circuits represent the fundamental building blocks of quantum algorithms, and obfuscation techniques are crucial for protecting the sensitive information and intellectual property encoded in these circuits. This paper constitutes the first security analysis of circuit cutting techniques as a means to protect quantum circuits, and not just for cutting bigger quantum circuits to fit on smaller devices. As cloud providers are in control of quantum computers and give access to users, utilizing cloud-based quantum computers for executing quantum circuits involves considerable security risks. This work demonstrates that quantum circuits can be effectively obfuscated by using quantum circuit cutting techniques. If users are worried about an adversary who attempts to reverse-engineer the original quantum algorithm, circuit cutting can be used as a security measure. To further provide configurable obfuscation level, i.e. number of possible circuits that the cloud provider would have to guess, this work proposes a novel dummy-subcircuits technique. This technique introduces dummy subcircuits with additional qubit cut points to create more confusion for the cloud provider and further help to obfuscate the user's original circuits with limited cost.