CHEQ: Towards Enabling Circuit Integrity Checking in Quantum Controllers

Rapid advances in quantum computing hardware and software are bringing closer the promise of new discoveries and breakthroughs that these machines will enable. To fully utilize and trust the quantum computers, however, users need to have assurances about the confidentiality and integrity of quantum circuits that they execute on the quantum computers. While existing research has begun to address the issues of quantum circuit confidentiality, for example, through various obfuscation methods, there is lack of quantum computer architecture or hardware designs for ensuring and checking the integrity of quantum circuits. This gap in existing research and design of quantum computers is addressed in this paper. This work outlines the design of CHEQ, a Circuit Hashing Engine for Quantum controllers. This work first presents integrity requirements for quantum circuits, then details the design of CHEQ, along with first set of evaluation results. By providing circuit integrity measurements to users through CHEQ, quantum computing systems can become more resilient to security threats that aim to attack circuit integrity. Combined with other prior work on confidentiality, the new CHEQ integrity assurance in quantum computers can enable complete circuit protection, and thus protection of the future discoveries and breakthroughs generated by quantum computers.