Yao Ma | LIP6 - Équipe QI

Quantum Hardware Security and Near-term Applications

Mon, 04 Dec 2023 00:00:00 +0000

Les primitives de sécurité matérielle sont des composants et des mécanismes fondamentaux basés sur le matériel et utilisés pour améliorer la sécurité des systèmes informatiques modernes en général. Ces primitives fournissent des éléments de base pour la mise en œuvre des fonctions de sécurité et la protection contre les menaces afin de garantir l’intégrité, la confidentialité et la disponibilité des informations et des ressources. Avec le développement à grande vitesse de l’informatique quantique et du traitement de l’information, la construction de primitives de sécurité matérielle avec des systèmes mécaniques quantiques présente un énorme potentiel. En parallèle, il devient de plus en plus important de traiter les vulnérabilités potentielles du point de vue matériel pour garantir les propriétés de sécurité des applications quantiques.

La thèse se concentre sur les primitives de sécurité matérielles pratiques en analogie quantique, qui se réfèrent à la conception et à la mise en œuvre de fonctions de sécurité matérielles avec des systèmes mécaniques quantiques contre diverses menaces et attaques. Notre recherche s’articule autour de deux questions: Comment les systèmes mécaniques quantiques peuvent-ils améliorer la sécurité des primitives de sécurité matérielle existantes? Et comment les primitives de sécurité matérielle peuvent-elles protéger les systèmes d’informatique quantique? Nous apportons les réponses en étudiant deux types de primitives de sécurité matérielle avec des systèmes mécaniques quantiques, de la construction à l’application: Physical Unclonable Function (PUF) et Trusted Execution Environments (TEE).

Nous proposons tout d’abord des constructions hybrides classiques-quantiques de PUF appelées HPUF et HLPUF. Alors que les PUF exploitent les propriétés physiques propres à chaque dispositif matériel individuel pour générer des clés ou des identifiants spécifiques, nos constructions intègrent des technologies de traitement quantique de l’information et mettent en œuvre des protocoles d’authentification et de communication sécurisés avec des clés quantiques réutilisables. Deuxièmement, inspirés par les TEE qui obtiennent des propriétés d’isolation par un mécanisme matériel, nous proposons la construction de QEnclave avec des systèmes mécaniques quantiques. L’idée est de fournir des environnements d’exécution isolés et sécurisés au sein d’un système informatique quantique plus large en utilisant des enclaves/processeurs sécurisés pour protéger les opérations sensibles d’un accès non autorisé ou d’une altération avec des hypothèses de confiance minimales. Il en résulte une construction de QEnclave assez simple de manière opérationnelle, avec l’exécution de rotations sur des qubits uniques. Nous montrons que QEnclave permet un calcul quantique délégué privé sur le serveur sur le nuage avec un utilisateur classique distant dans le cadre des définitions de sécurité.

Quantum Hardware Security and Near-term Applications

Mon, 04 Dec 2023 00:00:00 +0000

Hardware security primitives are hardware-based fundamental components and mechanisms used to enhance the security of modern computing systems in general. These primitives provide building blocks for implementing security features and safeguarding against threats to ensure integrity, confidentiality, and availability of information and resources. With the high-speed development of quantum computation and information processing, a huge potential is shown in constructing hardware security primitives with quantum mechanical systems. Meanwhile, addressing potential vulnerabilities from the hardware perspective is becoming increasingly important to ensure the security properties of quantum applications. The thesis focuses on practical hardware security primitives in quantum analogue, which refer to designing and implementing hardware-based security features with quantum mechanical systems against various threats and attacks. Our research follows two questions: How can quantum mechanical systems enhance the security of existing hardware security primitives? And how can hardware security primitives protect quantum computing systems? We give the answers by studying two different types of hardware security primitives with quantum mechanical systems from constructions to applications: Physical Unclonable Function (PUF) and Trusted Execution Environments (TEE). We first propose classical-quantum hybrid constructions of PUFs called HPUF and HLPUF. When PUFs exploit physical properties unique to each individual hardware device to generate device-specific keys or identifiers, our constructions incorporate quantum information processing technologies and implement quantum-secure authentication and secure communication protocols with reusable quantum keys. Secondly, inspired by TEEs that achieve isolation properties by hardware mechanism, we propose the QEnclave construction with quantum mechanical systems. The idea is to provide an isolated and secure execution environment within a larger quantum computing system by utilising secure enclaves/processors to protect sensitive operations from unauthorized access or tampering with minimal trust assumptions. It results in an operationally simple enough QEnclave construction with performing rotations on single qubits. We show that QEnclave enables delegated blind quantum computation on the cloud server with a remote classical user under the security definitions.

Quantum Lock: A Provable Quantum Communication Advantage

Mon, 21 Nov 2022 00:00:00 +0000

Physical unclonable functions(PUFs) provide a unique fingerprint to a physical entity by exploiting the inherent physical randomness. Gao et al. discussed the vulnerability of most current-day PUFs to sophisticated machine learning-based attacks. We address this problem by integrating classical PUFs and existing quantum communication technology. Specifically, this paper proposes a generic design of provably secure PUFs, called hybrid locked PUFs(HLPUFs), providing a practical solution for securing classical PUFs. An HLPUF uses a classical PUF(CPUF), and encodes the output into non-orthogonal quantum states to hide the outcomes of the underlying CPUF from any adversary. Here we introduce a quantum lock to protect the HLPUFs from any general adversaries. The indistinguishability property of the non-orthogonal quantum states, together with the quantum lockdown technique prevents the adversary from accessing the outcome of the CPUFs. Moreover, we show that by exploiting non-classical properties of quantum states, the HLPUF allows the server to reuse the challenge-response pairs for further client authentication. This result provides an efficient solution for running PUF-based client authentication for an extended period while maintaining a small-sized challenge-response pairs database on the server side. Later, we support our theoretical contributions by instantiating the HLPUFs design using accessible real-world CPUFs. We use the optimal classical machine-learning attacks to forge both the CPUFs and HLPUFs, and we certify the security gap in our numerical simulation for construction which is ready for implementation.

QEnclave - A practical solution for secure quantum cloud computing

Sat, 05 Nov 2022 00:00:00 +0000

We introduce a secure hardware device named a QEnclave that can secure the remote execution of quantum operations while only using classical controls. This device extends to quantum computing from the classical concept of a secure enclave that isolates a computation from its environment to provide privacy and tamper-resistance. Remarkably, our QEnclave only performs single qubit rotations but can nevertheless be used to secure an arbitrary quantum computation even if the qubit source is controlled by an adversary. More precisely, by attaching a QEnclave to a quantum computer, a remote client controlling the QEnclave can securely delegate its computation to the server solely using classical communication. We investigate the security of our QEnclave by modeling it as an ideal functionality named remote state rotation (RSR). We show that this resource, similar to the previously introduced functionality of remote state preparation, allows blind delegated quantum computing with perfect security. Our proof under the Abstract Cryptography framework shows the construction of remote state preparation from remote state rotation while preserving security. An immediate consequence is the weakening of the requirements for blind delegated computation. While previous delegated protocols relied on a client that can either generate or measure quantum states, we show that this same functionality can be achieved with a client that only transforms quantum states without generating or measuring them.