Pulse-to-Circuit Characterization of Stealthy Crosstalk Attack on Multi-Tenant Superconducting Quantum Hardware

• URL: http://arxiv.org/abs/2509.11407v1
• Date: Sun, 14 Sep 2025 19:48:46 GMT
• Title: Pulse-to-Circuit Characterization of Stealthy Crosstalk Attack on Multi-Tenant Superconducting Quantum Hardware
• Authors: Syed Emad Uddin Shubha, Tasnuva Farheen,
• Abstract summary: Hardware crosstalk in superconducting quantum computers constitutes a significant security threat.<n>We present the first end-to-end framework for mapping physical pulse-level attacks to interpretable logical error channels.<n>We propose a protocol-level detection strategy based on observable attack signatures, showing that stealthy attacks can be exposed through targeted monitoring.
• Score: 0.14323566945483496
• License: http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/
• Abstract: Hardware crosstalk in multi-tenant superconducting quantum computers constitutes a significant security threat, enabling adversaries to inject targeted errors across tenant boundaries. We present the first end-to-end framework for mapping physical pulse-level attacks to interpretable logical error channels, integrating density-matrix simulation, quantum process tomography (QPT), and a novel isometry-based circuit extraction method. Our pipeline reconstructs the complete induced error channel and fits an effective logical circuit model, revealing a fundamentally asymmetric attack mechanism: one adversarial qubit acts as a driver to set the induced logical rotation, while a second, the catalyst, refines the attack's coherence. Demonstrated on a linear three-qubit system, our approach shows that such attacks can significantly disrupt diverse quantum protocols, sometimes reducing accuracy to random guessing, while remaining effective and stealthy even under realistic hardware parameter variations. We further propose a protocol-level detection strategy based on observable attack signatures, showing that stealthy attacks can be exposed through targeted monitoring and providing a foundation for future defense-in-depth in quantum cloud platforms.

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