Quantum Spectral Authentication under Public Unitary Challenges

• URL: http://arxiv.org/abs/2603.24868v1
• Date: Wed, 25 Mar 2026 23:15:11 GMT
• Title: Quantum Spectral Authentication under Public Unitary Challenges
• Abstract summary: Quantum Spectral Authentication (QSA) is a primitive for verifying that a remote quantum endpoint still possesses a previously installed secret quantum resource.<n>We analyse attack strategies including eigenstate propagation across challenges, repeated-session leakage, and direct online forgery.<n> QSA offers a plausible near-term authentication layer for quantum networks and control-plane applications.
• Score: 0.0
• License: http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/
• Abstract: We introduce Quantum Spectral Authentication (QSA), a primitive for verifying that a remote quantum endpoint still possesses a previously installed secret quantum resource, such as a hidden state or state-preparation capability, without revealing that secret. QSA uses fresh public unitary challenges and spectral features of the planted state to derive transcript-bound session material for explicit authentication. We analyse attack strategies including eigenstate propagation across challenges, repeated-session leakage, and direct online forgery. For practical implementation, we develop a symmetric verifier-driven unitary compiler compatible with low-depth quantum phase estimation. Simulations indicate that this symmetric fast-power construction is substantially more noise tolerant than an asymmetric alternative, and small-instance experiments on IBM ibm_fez provide a hardware sanity check. QSA therefore offers a plausible near-term authentication layer for quantum networks and control-plane applications.

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