Trustworthy Quantum Computation through Quantum Physical Unclonable Functions

Abstract

Quantum computing is under rapid development, and today there are several cloud-based, quantum computers (QCs) of modest size (>100s of physical qubits). Although these QCs, along with their highly-specialized classical support infrastructure, are in limited supply, they are readily available for remote access and programming. This work shows the viability of using intrinsic quantum hardware properties for fingerprinting cloud-based QCs that exist today. We demonstrate the reliability of intrinsic fingerprinting with real QC characterization data, as well as simulated QC data, and we detail a quantum physically unclonable function (Q-PUF) scheme for secure key generation using unique fingerprint data combined with fuzzy extraction. We use fixed-frequency transmon qubits for prototyping our methods