Cloud-based quantum computers from IBM, Rigetti, Quantinuum and others are accessible to anyone with an account and virtually none of them have meaningful security controls at the hardware level. Once a user loads a circuit onto a quantum processing unit, there are no integrity checks, no isolation guarantees and no protection against a class of attacks that exploit a fundamental hardware artifact: cross-talk, the unwanted qubit-to-qubit interactions triggered by quantum gate execution on shared hardware.

This session, led by Jakub Szefer, associate professor at Northwestern University, will cover:

• How cross-talk between qubits on shared quantum processors enables one user to interfere with or extract information from another user's computation;
• How multi-tenancy on cloud quantum hardware creates a remote attack surface;
• What experimental results on real IBM quantum machines reveal about the current state of quantum hardware security.