Simulation of cybersecurity attacks on hybrid quantum systems

Background: Quantum technologies are evolving rapidly, we are now in the era referred as Noisy Intermediate Scale Quantum (NISQ). Currently, research is focused on Quantum Error Correction and Quantum Hardware concerning security aspects. Aim: In this paper, we aim to investigate the attack surface in a hybrid quantum-classical scenario from an attacker perspective. It is the most common scenario regarding quantum computing in the software engineering community. Method: We perform a poisoning attack on both the classical and quantum implementation of the Support Vector Machine (SVM) algorithm, to compare them and test its effectiveness. We also perform a "noise simulation" attack, where the attacker exploits a feature exclusive to quantum hardware, to increase decoherence in the system, worsening overall performance. Results: We found that the quantum implementation of the SVM algorithm is also vulnerable to poisoning attacks. The severity of the attack is hard to compare and is reduced when performing data preprocessing techniques. We were able to test how simulating noise can worsen the performance of a model: the idea is to simulate noise in the official library used to perform local computation by simulating qubits, effectively worsening the model’s performance. Conclusion: Our findings showed how hybrid quantum-classical system can be exploited by an attacker. As future work, it will be interesting to explore related security aspects.