Collaborative Research: SaTC: CORE: Medium: Designing Secure Quantum Computing Systems from Bottom-up

Researchers and engineers worldwide are racing to build quantum computers to solve computationally challenging problems, enabling new scientific discoveries and generating valuable intellectual property and data. Decades of research have shown that wherever valuable or sensitive information is on a computer system, it's at risk of being stolen or attacked. To understand and mitigate security risks, this project proactively studies system security for quantum computers. The project focuses on fundamental security vulnerabilities that can affect existing noisy intermediate-scale quantum computers and upcoming fault-tolerant quantum computers. This project also studies remediation for both hardware-specific and agnostic side-channel vulnerabilities. The project's broader significance and importance are rooted in the need to democratize access to costly and scarce quantum hardware by sharing it efficiently among multiple users while ensuring secure and confidential computations to foster innovation. The team also integrates the research into educational components by conducting tutorials and workshops and developing course materials. The project studies and develops a secure execution model for quantum computers by building prototypes of a novel quantum trusted execution environment and developing a systematic understanding and defenses for physical attacks on quantum computing systems. Given rapid advances in quantum error correction, the project targets fault-tolerant quantum computing architectures, specifically focusing on developing remediation techniques to prevent physical attacks, including timing, power-based, and other side channels arising at large scales. This award reflects NSF's statutory mission and has been deemed worthy of support through evaluation using the Foundation's intellectual merit and broader impacts review criteria.