An official website of the United States government
Quantum computing (QC) is a new paradigm offering the potential of exponential speedups over classical computing for certain computational problems. Each additional qubit doubles the size of the computational state space available to a QC algorithm. This exponential scaling underlies QC’s power, but today’s Noisy Intermediate-Scale Quantum (NISQ) devices face significant engineering challenges in scalability. The set of quantum circuits that can be reliably run on NISQ devices is limited by their noisy operations and low qubit counts. This paper introduces CutQC, a scalable hybrid computing approach that combines classical computers and quantum computers to enable evaluation of quantum circuits that cannot be run on classical or quantum computers alone. CutQC cuts large quantum circuits into smaller subcircuits, allowing them to be executed on smaller quantum devices. Classical postprocessing can then reconstruct the output of the original circuit. This approach offers significant runtime speedup compared with the only viable current alternative -- purely classical simulations -- and demonstrates evaluation of quantum circuits that are larger than the limit of QC or classical simulation. Furthermore, in real-system runs, CutQC achieves much higher quantum circuit evaluation fidelity using small prototype quantum computers than the state-of-the-art large NISQ devices achieve. Overall, this hybrid approach allows users to leverage classical and quantum computing resources to evaluate quantum programs far beyond the reach of either one alone.
more »
« less
Quantum Circuit Reconstruction from Power Side-Channel Attacks on Quantum Computer Controllers
The interest in quantum computing has grown rapidly in recent years, and with it grows the importance of securing quantum circuits. A novel type of threat to quantum circuits that dedicated attackers could launch are power trace attacks. To address this threat, this paper presents first formalization and demonstration of using power traces to unlock and steal quantum circuit secrets. With access to power traces, attackers can recover information about the control pulses sent to quantum computers. From the control pulses, the gate level description of the circuits, and eventually the secret algorithms can be reverse engineered. This work demonstrates how and what information could be recovered. This work uses algebraic reconstruction from power traces to realize two new types of single trace attacks: per-channel and total power attacks. The former attack relies on per-channel measurements to perform a brute-force attack to reconstruct the quantum circuits. The latter attack performs a single-trace attack using Mixed-Integer Linear Programming optimization. Through the use of algebraic reconstruction, this work demonstrates that quantum circuit secrets can be stolen with high accuracy. Evaluation on 32 real benchmark quantum circuits shows that our technique is highly effective at reconstructing quantum circuits. The findings not only show the veracity of the potential attacks, but also the need to develop new means to protect quantum circuits from power trace attacks. Throughout this work real control pulse information from real quantum computers is used to demonstrate potential attacks based on simulation of collection of power traces.
more »
« less
- PAR ID:
- 10515133
- Publisher / Repository:
- TCHES
- Date Published:
- Journal Name:
- IACR Transactions on Cryptographic Hardware and Embedded Systems
- Volume:
- 2024
- Issue:
- 2
- ISSN:
- 2569-2925
- Page Range / eLocation ID:
- 735 to 768
- Format(s):
- Medium: X
- Sponsoring Org:
- National Science Foundation
More Like this
-
-
Key exchange protocols and key encapsulation mechanisms establish secret keys to communicate digital information confidentially over public channels. Lattice-based cryptography variants of these protocols are promising alternatives given their quantum-cryptanalysis resistance and implementation efficiency. Although lattice cryptosystems can be mathematically secure, their implementations have shown side-channel vulnerabilities. But such attacks largely presume collecting multiple measurements under a fixed key, leaving the more dangerous single-trace attacks unexplored. This article demonstrates successful single-trace power side-channel attacks on lattice-based key exchange and encapsulation protocols. Our attack targets both hardware and software implementations of matrix multiplications used in lattice cryptosystems. The crux of our idea is to apply a horizontal attack that makes hypotheses on several intermediate values within a single execution all relating to the same secret, and to combine their correlations for accurately estimating the secret key. We illustrate that the design of protocols combined with the nature of lattice arithmetic enables our attack. Since a straightforward attack suffers from false positives, we demonstrate a novel extend-and-prune procedure to recover the key by following the sequence of intermediate updates during multiplication. We analyzed two protocols, Frodo and FrodoKEM , and reveal that they are vulnerable to our attack. We implement both stand-alone hardware and RISC-V based software realizations and test the effectiveness of the proposed attack by using concrete parameters of these protocols on physical platforms with real measurements. We show that the proposed attack can estimate secret keys from a single power measurement with over 99% success rate.more » « less
-
null (Ed.)This article, for the first time, demonstrates Cross-device Deep Learning Side-Channel Attack (X-DeepSCA), achieving an accuracy of > 99.9%, even in presence of significantly higher inter-device variations compared to the inter-key variations. Augmenting traces captured from multiple devices for training and with proper choice of hyper-parameters, the proposed 256-class Deep Neural Network (DNN) learns accurately from the power side-channel leakage of an AES-128 target encryption engine, and an N-trace (N ≤ 10) X-DeepSCA attack breaks different target devices within seconds compared to a few minutes for a correlational power analysis (CPA) attack, thereby increasing the threat surface for embedded devices significantly. Even for low SNR scenarios, the proposed X-DeepSCA attack achieves ∼ 10× lower minimum traces to disclosure (MTD) compared to a traditional CPA.more » « less
-
This article, for the first time, demonstrates Cross-device Deep Learning Side-Channel Attack (X-DeepSCA), achieving an accuracy of > 99.9%, even in presence of significantly higher inter-device variations compared to the inter-key variations. Augmenting traces captured from multiple devices for training and with proper choice of hyper-parameters, the proposed 256-class Deep Neural Network (DNN) learns accurately from the power side-channel leakage of an AES-128 target encryption engine, and an N-trace (N ≤ 10) X-DeepSCA attack breaks different target devices within seconds compared to a few minutes for a correlational power analysis (CPA) attack, thereby increasing the threat surface for embedded devices significantly. Even for low SNR scenarios, the proposed X-DeepSCA attack achieves ~10× lower minimum traces to disclosure (MTD) compared to a traditional CPA.more » « less
-
Post-quantum cryptography (PQC) refers to cryptographic algorithms that are thought to be secure against a cryptanalytic attack by a quantum computer. Before PQC algorithms can be widely deployed to replace the current standards such as the RSA algorithm, they need to be rigorously evaluated theoretically and practically. In this work, we present a cloud-based infrastructure being developed for performing side-channel analysis on PQC algorithms for the research community. Multiple types of side-channel attacks, such as timing attacks, power attacks, and electromagnetic attacks can be applied on different types of devices, such as FPGA devices and microcontrollers. An automated tool flow is being developed that can run executables on the target devices, collect traces (e.g., power consumption waveforms and electromagnetic radiation signals), perform leakage assessment (using Test Vector Leakage Assessment), and generate analysis reports. Remote users access the infrastructure through a web portal by uploading the hardware or software implementations of cryptographic algorithms. Side-channel attack and leakage analysis are performed on the given implementation. Finally, the user is informed for downloading the analysis report from the portal.more » « less
- Free Publicly Accessible Full Text
-
Accepted Manuscript1.0
- Journal Article:
- https://doi.org/10.46586/tches.v2024.i2.735-768
