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

The tutorial will be presented on Thursday, Sept. 17, 2026 starting at 1pm EDT.

The tutorial will be presented in-person at the QCE conference, in Room 716B.

This tutorial will introduce the audience to the emerging field of secure quantum computing, which focuses on research on how to make quantum computing systems secure from attacks. By design, this tutorial will not cover post-quantum cryptography as that is an essential but orthogonal topic. The tutorial focuses on the security of quantum computing systems, as rapid advances in quantum computer technologies hold the promise of enabling quantum computers to run algorithms for generating novel drugs or material compounds. Once quantum computers are generating or processing sensitive data or valuable intellectual property, they will become a target for attacks that aim to disrupt their operation, modify computations, or even attempt to steal data or quantum circuit code. Moreover, many quantum computers are already cloud-based, and with remote, on-demand cloud access, they make them vulnerable to remote security attacks, no different from those in today's classical cloud computing. First, this tutorial will introduce the audience to classical computer security concepts, including threat modelling, confidentiality, integrity, and availability, as well as information leaks, side-channel and covert-channel attacks. Second, this tutorial will demonstrate examples of security attacks prototyped on real cloud-based NISQ quantum computers available today, as well as prototype attacks of FTQC quantum computers. Third, the tutorial will present designs for securing the cloud-based NISQ and FTQC quantum computers. Lastly, the tutorial will present challenges and opportunities to build quantum computer security from the ground up, rather than patch them later once security attacks have occurred in the wild.

The tutorial will be presented in two sessions separated by a coffee break, as outlined below.

• 13:00 - 14:30: Tutorial (Parts 1 to 2)
• 14:30 - 15:00: Break
• 15:00 - 16:30: Tutorial (Parts 3 to 4)
• 16:30: End

Slides from the tutorial are available for download below, split into four parts. Or click here to email and request free copy of the PDFs of the slides.

• Part 1 -- Introduction and Motivation
• Part 2 -- Crosstalk and Fault Injection in NISQ Quantum Computers
• Part 3 -- Side Channels in NISQ and FTQC Quantum Computers
• Part 4 -- Trusted Execution Environments for Quantum Computers
• Part 5 Extra -- Hardware Security for QML