Obfuscating Quantum Hybrid-Classical Algorithms for Security and Privacy

Suryansh Upadhyay1 and Swaroop Ghosh2
1Penn State University, 2Pennsylvania State University


Abstract

In the growing quantum computing landscape, addressing security and privacy issues is vital. Third-party quantum services may attract users due to cost and availability, but pose IP theft risks. To mitigate this, we propose an edge pruning obfuscation method and split iteration for Quantum Approximate Optimization Algorithm (QAOA). This approach secures IP, increases reconstruction difficulty, with limited performance degradation (up to 10%) and low overhead costs (less than 0.5X).