Confidential Quantum Computing

Abstract

Quantum computing is becoming more accessible with increasing numbers of quantum platforms. The confidentiality and integrity of data and algorithms running on these systems are important assets that need to be protected from untrusted parties. Previous approaches focus on the encryption of individual sub-areas, often using at least hybrid clients, and do not take the entire path from the classical client via a platform to the quantum computing hardware into consideration. Based on the classification of quantum algorithms we show the assets worth protecting, evolve the data flow on third-party quantum hardware and quantum computing platforms, and propose a concept architecture addressing confidentiality and integrity of processed data and code. Our approach shows that confidentiality can already be achieved for data with classical clients, while code confidentiality remains an open question. Our approach covers integrity for most complexity classes.