Quantum Properties Trojans (QuPTs) for Attacking Quantum Neural Networks
This addresses security vulnerabilities in quantum machine learning for researchers and practitioners, but it is incremental as it builds on existing Trojan attack concepts in classical or hybrid systems.
The paper tackled the security of quantum neural networks (QNNs) by proposing Quantum Properties Trojans (QuPTs) for attacks, resulting in a 23% accuracy deterioration in a compromised QNN.
Quantum neural networks (QNN) hold immense potential for the future of quantum machine learning (QML). However, QNN security and robustness remain largely unexplored. In this work, we proposed novel Trojan attacks based on the quantum computing properties in a QNN-based binary classifier. Our proposed Quantum Properties Trojans (QuPTs) are based on the unitary property of quantum gates to insert noise and Hadamard gates to enable superposition to develop Trojans and attack QNNs. We showed that the proposed QuPTs are significantly stealthier and heavily impact the quantum circuits' performance, specifically QNNs. The most impactful QuPT caused a deterioration of 23% accuracy of the compromised QNN under the experimental setup. To the best of our knowledge, this is the first work on the Trojan attack on a fully quantum neural network independent of any hybrid classical-quantum architecture.