Quantum Computer Fingerprinting using Error Syndromes
Abstract
As quantum computing matures and moves toward broader accessibility through cloud-based platforms, ensuring the authenticity and integrity of quantum computations becomes an urgent concern. In this work, we propose a strategy to leverage the byproducts of quantum error correction (QEC) to verify hardware identity and authenticate quantum computations for "free", without introducing any additional quantum computations or measurements. By treating syndrome measurements as a source of metadata, we embed verification seamlessly into standard QEC protocols and eliminate the need for separate challenge-response pairs. We validate our approach using multiple error-correcting codes, quantum states, and circuit compilation strategies on several generations of IBM quantum computers. Our classifiers achieve 99% accuracy with only 500 shots in distinguishing among five backends. Overall, we re-purpose the intrinsic overhead of error correction to be a mechanism for securing quantum computation.
Cite
@article{arxiv.2506.16614,
title = {Quantum Computer Fingerprinting using Error Syndromes},
author = {Vincent Mutolo and Devon Campbell and Quinn Manning and Henri Witold Dubourg and Ruibin Lyu and Simha Sethumadhavan and Daniel Rubenstein and Salvatore Stolfo},
journal= {arXiv preprint arXiv:2506.16614},
year = {2025}
}