Information leakage controls privacy in multi-user quantum cloud systems
Coherence Rather Than Error Rate Governs Privacy in Multi-Tenant Quantum Computing
Cryptography and Security
Summary
When multiple users share a quantum computer hosted in the cloud, they expect their computations to stay private. The usual way providers report errors in these devices doesn't show how much information one user might accidentally learn about another. The authors show that the type of errors, especially coherent errors, matter more for privacy than just the average error rate. They measured this leakage on real quantum devices and found it varies even for similar error rates. They also demonstrate a way to reduce this leakage by randomizing the victim user's quantum state, though this method can introduce other errors in practice.
What this means in practice
- •For quantum cloud operators: Include measures of information leakage in addition to error rates to better inform customers about privacy risks of shared quantum processors.
- •For quantum hardware engineers: Design error mitigation techniques that specifically target coherent errors to minimize privacy leaks between users on multi-tenant quantum devices.
Authors
Farhad Farokhi
Abstract
Multi-tenant computing enables providers of commercial cloud quantum processors to rent disjoint sectors of a device to independent users. Average gate error, which cloud quantum computing providers report, does not determine how much one tenant learns about another. We propose an information-theoretic notion of information leakage across co-tenancy boundaries stemming from quantum state distinguishability. We measure this leakage on commercially-available 156-qubit (IBM Kingston) and 20-qubit (IQM Garnet) devices. Boundaries with identical benchmarked error can offer significantly different amount of information leakage because standard reported measures of error are blind to coherent-versus-stochastic nature of the error while the proposed notion of information leakage is not. A uniform Pauli randomisation implemented over the victim's whole register is used as a defence mechanism to reduce the information leakage to zero. The defence theoretically does not incur a fidelity cost, but the experiments show a non-trivial degradation caused by accumulation of errors. We provide a specific call-for-action to the providers of quantum cloud computing to report information leakage in addition to standard error rates in their device datasheet to enable users to compute privacy and security risks prior to engagement with the device.