Impact of Noise on the Resilience and the Security of Quantum Computing

Abdullah Ash- Saki, Mahabubul Alam, Swaroop Ghosh
Pennsylvania State University


Abstract

Qubits, which are building blocks of quantum computers, are fragile and prone to noise and error. Some prominent errors include, decoherence/dephasing, gate error, readout error, leakage and crosstalk. The computation quality degrades in presence of errors. Therefore, even though quantum computing can theoretically speed-up certain class of combinatorial optimization problems, the commercial Noisy Intermediate-Scale Quantum (NISQ) computers can only solve small-scale problems. In this work, we present a overview of various noise sources and their impact on the resilience and security of quantum circuits. Our analysis indicates that noise sources (e.g., crosstalk) create new attack surface (e.g., fault injection) especially for future large scale quantum computers that may employ multi-programming compute model. We also propose countermeasures against the reliability and security issues.