Prof. Jakub Szefer, Computer Architecture and Security Laboratory, Dept. of Electrical and Computer Engineering, Northwestern University.

The tutorial will be presented on Saturday, June 21, 2025 starting at 8am Japan Standard Time.

The tutorial will be presented in-person at the ISCA conference, room details will be provided closer to the conference date.

This tutorial will introduce the audience to the emerging field of quantum computer architecture security, which focuses on research on how to make quantum computing architectures secure. With rapid advances in quantum computer technologies, as the number of qubits increases, and the fidelity of the qubits and operations improves, these computers will be able to generate novel drugs or material compounds. Once the computers are generating or processing sensitive or valuable information, they will become a target for security attacks. Moreover, many quantum computers are already cloud-based. Remote, on-demand cloud computing access to quantum computers makes them vulnerable to numerous security attacks. First, this tutorial will introduce audience to classical computer security ideas such as threat modeling, confidentiality, integrity, and availability, information leaks, side- and covert-channel attacks. Second, this tutorial will demonstrate examples of security attacks prototyped on real cloud-based NISQ quantum computers available today, and preliminary exploration of attacks on fault-tolerant quantum computers (FTQC). Third, the tutorial will present design approaches for securing the cloud-based NISQ and FTQC from the security attacks. Lastly, the tutorial will present challenges and opportunities to build quantum computer securely from the ground up, rather than patching them later once security attacks have occurred in the wild.

This will be a half-day tutorial.

The schedule of the tutorial will be provided closer to the conference date.