Search: “quantum-computing”

Hardware Fingerprinting FTQC via Quantum Decoder Timing

Quantum decoder timing on IBM Heron processors forms a side channel enabling device fingerprinting with 89% accuracy and workload inference.

The work demonstrates that wall-clock syndrome-decoding times on fault-tolerant quantum computers constitute a novel hardware side channel. Using per-shot decoder timings from three IBM Heron processors collected over 68 days, a passive observer can reconstruct detector-firing distributions, estimate logical error rate, infer code distance, and fingerprint the specific device with up to 89% accuracy versus 33% for random guessing. Noisy simulation based on Google's 105-qubit Willow processor distinguishes nine surface-code patches at 81% accuracy, showing the channel persists across vendors and code families.

arXiv cs.CR·Sep 10, 19:24 UTC · 5d agoResearch

Certifying Adversarial Robustness of Quantum Classifiers under Known-Readout Query Access

Framework certifies adversarial robustness of quantum classifiers using only measurement statistics and finite-shot outcomes, demonstrated on IBM Quantum hardware.

The paper introduces a measurement-only certification framework for adversarial robustness of quantum classifiers under known-readout query access, requiring no tomography, parameters, or gradients. It returns a lower bound ruling out untargeted errors within a radius and an attack-independent upper bound witnessing an adversarial state, both estimable with finite-sample guarantees. Evaluations show the lower bound tracks exact optima on tractable instances while the upper bound stays informative when standard attacks fail. The method was validated on IBM Quantum hardware using 40 executions of two 8-qubit quantum neural networks.

arXiv cs.CR·Sep 10, 14:45 UTC · 5d agoResearch

Evaluating Verified Autonomy in Quantum Engineering

Quantum-Harbor lab and QIQCBench (49 tasks) expose wide performance gaps across 17 frontier agentic systems in verified quantum engineering.

Researchers built Quantum-Harbor, a virtual laboratory providing a controlled execution environment where scientific AI agents interacting with quantum systems can have both actions and conclusions directly verified. QIQCBench contributes 49 expert-authored tasks spanning calibration and control, error correction and compilation, and sensing and networking. Across 17 frontier agentic systems, verified performance varied widely, exposing a substantial gap between demonstrated capability and reliable autonomous operation.

arXiv cs.AI / cs.LG / cs.CL·Sep 15, 16:46 UTC · 21h agoAI research1

Post-quantum cryptography adoption and the national security implications

Opinion analysis argues quantum computing favors nation-state espionage, leaving lagging post-quantum adoption at critical infrastructure exposed to harvest-now-decrypt-later attacks.

A CSO Online opinion piece argues that the extreme cost and infrastructure requirements of quantum computers will concentrate cryptographically relevant quantum capability among nation-states and a few corporations, favoring espionage and economic espionage over criminal monetization. It highlights harvest-now-decrypt-later risk to long-lived secrets, expert warnings such as Filippo Valsorda's, and diverging CRQC timelines with Google suggesting possibly 2029. The piece predicts governments, banks, and targeted sectors will adopt PQC first while utilities, small hospitals, and local government lag, widening exploitable gaps in critical infrastructure reminiscent of Salt Typhoon-style access.

CSO Online·Sep 9, 09:00 UTC · 7d agoIndustry

LLM-Driven Algorithm Design for Quantum Circuit Synthesis based on Binary Decision Diagrams

QuantumEvo uses an LLM to evolve BDD variable-ordering heuristics, achieving a 70.9% tie-or-win rate on quantum circuit cost versus baseline methods.

The QuantumEvo framework uses an LLM as a heuristic generator for quantum-cost-aware BDD variable ordering in reversible circuit synthesis, searching over heuristics initialized from multiple families and selecting them by downstream quantum circuit cost. The discovered heuristic HGA-QE modifies the sifting step inside a genetic algorithm and achieves a 70.9% tie-or-win rate against the per-function best baseline, with strict wins on 13.5% of functions. Advantages are clearer on benchmark suites not used for heuristic discovery.

arXiv cs.AI / cs.LG / cs.CL·Sep 4, 16:25 UTC · 11d agoAI research1

How GPT-5.6 Sol helps run quantum computing experiments

OpenAI describes an MIT researcher using GPT-5.6 Sol with Codex to autonomously run and calibrate quantum computing experiments.

OpenAI published a case study showing how an MIT researcher uses GPT-5.6 Sol together with Codex to autonomously run quantum computing experiments, analyze results, and calibrate qubits. The post is a product application story rather than a new benchmark, paper, or model release.

OpenAI News·Sep 8, 17:00 UTC · 7d agoAI industry1

Observational Indistinguishability and Integrity Blind Regions in Hybrid Quantum-Classical Workflows

Framework formalizes integrity blind regions in hybrid quantum-classical workflows, validated across 3,600 label interventions with conformal detection rules.

The paper presents a claim-relative evidence and reference framework for integrity of hybrid quantum-classical workflows, distinguishing structural blind regions caused by observational indistinguishability from finite-batch statistical misses. Experiments over 3,600 label interventions show exact label-path invariance for feature and prediction views. The geometry-aligned construction detects 343 of 2,700 conclusion-changing interventions using the conformal rule and 1,183 of 2,700 with the uncorrected union, with executed conformal clean false-action rates of 0.048-0.059.

arXiv cs.CR·Sep 15, 13:16 UTC · 1d agoResearch

EFI Pairs Without One-Way Puzzles: Oracle Separations from Communication Complexity

Theorists build a classical oracle where one-way puzzles fail yet EFI pairs survive, separating two candidate minimal assumptions of quantum cryptography.

The paper constructs a single classical oracle relative to which one-way puzzles do not exist, even with an unbounded verifier, while an EFI pair survives every classical-query distinguisher holding advice, making one superposition query at the end. Security is proven by reducing adversary knowledge to communication complexity for Vector-in-Subspace, with the superposition query bounded using random matrix theory. Relative to the oracle, quantum polynomial time offers no advantage on tasks with classical inputs and outputs and there is no proof of quantumness, separating the leading minimal assumptions of quantum cryptography.

arXiv cs.CR·Sep 10, 17:54 UTC · 5d agoResearch

Operational Roles of QRNG-Derived Quantum Entropy in Bitcoin Proof-of-Work Architectures

arXiv study finds quantum-random entropy adds no Bitcoin PoW success advantage but helps assurance in fault and provenance scenarios.

The paper shows replacing classical entropy with QRNG output does not change honest Bitcoin proof-of-work success probability when candidate headers remain distinct. It introduces a reproducible benchmark measuring an entropy-efficiency factor and a reboot-diversity index, finding QRNG value only in assurance-oriented scenarios involving correlated restart faults, namespace reuse, and entropy provenance. Validation is simulation-based, with hardware-in-the-loop testing identified as future work.

arXiv cs.CR·Sep 4, 12:47 UTC · 12d agoResearch

Python Now Has a Post-Quantum Encryption Library

Schneier on Security·Aug 10, 11:02 UTC · Aug 10, 2026Industry1

Why a cryptographic inventory is key for addressing the quantum computing threat

Tenable argues organizations need cryptographic inventories and phased plans to counter harvest-now-decrypt-later quantum attacks.

Tenable's blog warns that quantum computers will eventually break current public-key cryptographic algorithms, and that "harvest now, decrypt later" collection makes the risk operational today. It recommends building a comprehensive cryptographic inventory and executing a phased operational strategy to migrate toward quantum-resistant protection for stored and transmitted data.

Tenable Blog·Aug 28, 14:01 UTC · 18d agoIndustry

Optimizing Credential Blast Radius Through Trust Boundaries and Delegation Under Post-Quantum Authentication Costs

Academic paper models credential blast radius optimization across trust domains under post-quantum latency costs, cutting expected impact by up to 36%.

The paper formulates the joint selection of trust domains and credential-derivation structures under policy and latency constraints as an NP-hard optimization problem, showing the scalarized two-domain direct-issuance case reduces to a weighted minimum cut. In 195 of 230 exhaustive synthetic comparisons, joint optimization produced lower credential blast radius than choosing boundaries first, especially under chained delegation. A trace-derived replay using measured post-quantum authentication costs found the best design reduced expected impact by up to 36% relative to a single domain within the latency budget.

arXiv cs.CR·Sep 3, 23:42 UTC · 12d agoResearch

HyQuant: Hybrid-Precision Quantization for LLM Attention

HyQuant keeps most LLM attention states low-bit while preserving vertical-line tokens and local windows in high precision, maintaining near-lossless accuracy.

HyQuant is a hybrid-precision quantization framework for LLM attention that quantizes most attention states to low bits while keeping accuracy-critical vertical-line tokens and local-window states in full precision, selected via lightweight attention-pattern signals. In the prefill stage it uses a hybrid-precision attention operator, and in the decode stage it applies the same principle to KV-cache compression with fused dequantization and attention computation. Across diverse tasks, models, and datasets it maintains nearly lossless accuracy; code is available on GitHub.

Hugging Face daily papers·Aug 27, 20:00 UTC · 19d agoAI tools & infra1

Future-Proofing the Internet: Akamai Achieves End-to-End PQC

Akamai says it achieved end-to-end post-quantum cryptography across its network to future-proof internet traffic.

Akamai announced it has achieved end-to-end post-quantum cryptography (PQC) across its services. The company frames the move as future-proofing the internet against quantum decryption threats. No article text was available; details are limited to the announcement title.

Akamai Blog·Aug 19, 08:00 UTC · 28d agoIndustry

Nearly half of enterprises have no one leading PQC migration

Axiad survey finds 46% of enterprises lack a single leader for post-quantum cryptography migration despite most maintaining cryptographic inventories.

Axiad research on post-quantum cryptography (PQC) readiness found 75% of respondents maintain continuously updated inventories of certificates, keys, and algorithms, but 46% have no single person owning the migration. About half have never formally assessed whether public-facing infrastructure supports post-quantum key exchange. 67% said the harvest-now-decrypt-later threat is an active priority, with competing priorities, budget constraints, and lack of regulatory guidance cited as top obstacles; executives were more confident than PKI practitioners.

Help Net Security·Aug 21, 00:00 UTC · 26d agoPolicy & legal

Post-quantum migration gets harder when every user holds a key

Quantus CEO Christopher Smith discusses post-quantum migration pitfalls, including oversized keys breaking IPsec, SSH and TLS, and hard-to-migrate blockchain user keys.

Quantus CEO Christopher Smith describes post-quantum migration findings from banks and hospitals, including forgotten default passwords, orphaned admin keys held by former employees and hidden password hashes on user devices. Larger post-quantum keys and signatures break size assumptions in IPsec, SSH, TLS and libp2p, while migrating blockchain user keys remains hard because every user must act. He argues boards should fund quantum migration like insurance by quantifying cryptographic failure risk, and warns a silent quantum break would be difficult to detect from outside.

Help Net Security·Aug 12, 00:00 UTC · Aug 12, 2026Research

Quantum Feature Engineering for Credit Default Prediction: When and Why IQP Circuits Help Linear Classifiers

Quantum IQP circuit features lift logistic-regression credit-default F1 from 0.462 to 0.517, beating Kernel PCA at an equal feature budget.

Using the UCI Default of Credit Card Clients dataset and five-fold cross-validation, an 8-qubit IQP circuit adds 16 features that raise Logistic Regression F1 from 0.462 to 0.517 (+0.055, p < 0.0001). Kernel PCA, the best classical non-linear alternative, reaches only 0.493 at the same feature count, with the gap surviving Benjamini-Hochberg correction across 12 tests (p = 0.00007). Only the linear classifier benefits, pointing to a linear-expressivity mechanism. Feature selection matters: Random Forest importance-guided selection reaches F1 = 0.523 while maximally uncorrelated features drop to 0.496.

arXiv cs.AI / cs.LG / cs.CL·Sep 9, 17:41 UTC · 6d agoAI research

Quantization-Aware Healing: a compressed, 4-bit model that outperforms its full-precision original

Multiverse Computing details quantization-aware healing, producing a 4-bit compressed model that reportedly outperforms its full-precision original.

A Hugging Face blog post by Multiverse Computing's CAI team introduces quantization-aware healing for compressed models. The post claims the resulting 4-bit model outperforms the original full-precision model. No additional details or benchmarks were available in the provided text.

Hugging Face Blog·Aug 25, 11:39 UTC · 22d agoAI research

🔬“We have foundation models for language, not for physics” — Anima Anandkumar, Bren Professor of Computing

Caltech professor Anima Anandkumar discusses Neural Operators and FourCastNet for physics modeling, arguing inductive biases beat pure token scaling.

Anima Anandkumar, Bren Professor at Caltech and co-founder of Accelerated Understanding, describes Fourier Neural Operators that learn in frequency and spherical-harmonic domains to model weather, fusion, and fluid or heat flow. Her team built FourCastNet 3, a global weather model competitive with physics-based simulations that runs on consumer-grade GPUs. She also introduced TorchLean, a framework for writing PyTorch-style networks inside the Lean proof assistant for formal verification, and was appointed to the United Nations Scientific Advisory Board. She argues physical domains resist scaling due to tiny datasets and context lengths in the hundreds of billions, so progress comes from built-in structure and physical priors.

Latent Space·Aug 26, 15:15 UTC · 20d agoAI research1

GAUGE: A Formal Framework for Measuring Cryptographic Security under Heterogeneous Adversary Cost Models

GAUGE frames cryptographic security as profiles over adversary cost models, certifying a ranking reversal between ML-KEM-512 and AES-128 from a 4–5% memory pricing shift.

GAUGE represents cryptographic security as a function over admissible adversary cost models (a security profile), proves profiles are piecewise-linear and concave, and establishes a rating trilemma when two profiles cross. A polynomial-time linear-programming procedure certifies whether the ranking of two schemes is robust, reverses under admissible models, or is genuinely incomparable. Applied to NIST post-quantum standards, the framework certifies a ML-KEM-512 versus AES-128 ranking reversal from a 4–5% shift in memory pricing and measures lattice-sieving cost drift of 9.79 bits per year over eight years. A hybrid X25519 + ML-KEM-768 handshake reduces combined-break probability twenty-fold at a 2.3 kilobyte cost.

arXiv cs.CR·Sep 15, 14:55 UTC · 22h agoResearch

Google Cloud Targets 2027 for First Major Post-Quantum Security Milestone

Google Cloud set 2027 for its first major post-quantum cryptography milestone to counter store-now-decrypt-later risks, migrating through 2028.

Google Cloud announced a post-quantum cryptography roadmap targeting its first major security milestone in 2027. The plan aims to mitigate store-now-decrypt-later harvest risks, with wider migration goals extending through 2028. The roadmap affects cryptographic protections for Google Cloud services and customer migration planning timelines.

Infosecurity Magazine·Aug 13, 15:00 UTC · Aug 13, 2026Industry

PHAT: PHotonic Accelerator for TFHE

PHAT photonic accelerator using optically addressed phase-change memory speeds TFHE bootstrapping FFTs 2.14x-5.10x over the prior ASIC accelerator.

Researchers propose PHAT, an electro-photonic accelerator for TFHE fully homomorphic encryption built on optically addressed phase-change memory (OPCM) processing-in-memory. The architecture adds OPCM-based FFT units, a twiddle-stationary dataflow, and a scheduling mechanism to maximize FFT utilization for TFHE bootstrapping. It achieves 2.14x-5.10x speedups across four real-world TFHE workloads versus the state-of-the-art ASIC accelerator, improving feasibility of privacy-preserving computation in the cloud.

arXiv cs.CR·Sep 10, 14:30 UTC · 5d agoResearch

The G7 tells industry to hurry up and prep for post-quantum encryption

A G7 working group report urges governments and industry to accelerate post-quantum cryptography migration, framing quantum risk as a near-term economic threat.

A cybersecurity working group formed at the June 2026 G7 Summit in France called on organizations to stop postponing migration of critical systems to post-quantum cryptography, warning that harvest-now-decrypt-later attacks against currently encrypted data exist today. The report was signed by CISA, the UK NCSC, France's ANSSI, Germany's BSI, Canada's CSE, Japan's NCO, and Italy's ACN. It also cautions that some NIST-selected PQC algorithms have already been broken on classical computers, reinforcing support for crypto-agility. The push aligns with a recent US executive order moving federal PQC migration timelines from 2035 to 2030, while Google and others target 2029.

CyberScoop·Sep 3, 19:29 UTC · 12d agoPolicy & legal

New Guidance Helps Businesses Verify Quantum-Safe Hardware Claims

TCG issued guidance to help businesses verify that trusted platform modules genuinely meet quantum-safe requirements.

The Trusted Computing Group (TCG) published new guidance aimed at proving that trusted platform modules (TPMs) genuinely satisfy essential quantum-safe requirements. The document gives businesses a way to validate vendor claims about post-quantum readiness in hardware security rather than trusting marketing assertions. This is a guidance publication, not an incident or vulnerability disclosure.

Infosecurity Magazine·Aug 24, 16:00 UTC · 22d agoAdvisory

Bipartisan Senate bill aims to prepare energy sector for Q

Bipartisan Senate bill would direct FERC to factor quantum computing threats and post-quantum cryptography into US electric grid cybersecurity reliability standards.

The Quantum Grid Utility Assurance and Resilient Defense (Quantum-GUARD) Act, introduced by Senators Mike Rounds and Chris Coons, would require FERC to consider quantum computing threats when reviewing electric reliability standards and to explore post-quantum cryptography use in both IT and OT systems, plus a technical sandbox to study quantum impacts. It aligns with NIST's post-quantum algorithm work, and a June executive order moved the federal PQC migration deadline from 2035 to 2030. Industry experts noted the hard part is upgrading infrastructure such as SCADA communications and software update integrity ahead of those deadlines.

CyberScoop·Aug 24, 19:01 UTC · 22d agoPolicy & legal

Benchmarking Qwen3.8 27B quantizations: 4-bit holds up, 1-bit collapses

Quesma benchmarks Qwen3.8 27B quantizations: 4-bit Q4_K_M matches BF16 on key benchmarks while 1-bit collapses to random chance.

Quesma spent roughly $3,000 on Modal GPUs testing Unsloth GGUF quantizations of Qwen3.8 27B across GPQA Diamond, IFBench, and Terminal-Bench 2.1. The 17 GB Q4_K_M quantization matched the 55 GB BF16 model on Terminal-Bench 2.1 and showed little degradation down to 4-bit, while the 2-bit UD-Q2_K_XL dropped noticeably. At 1-bit, scores on GPQA Diamond fell to random-guess levels, with longer reasoning making results worse, and reasoning effort settings significantly affected outcomes.

Hacker News · AI·Sep 8, 14:49 UTC · 7d agoAI researchHN 56↑ · 30 comments1

Getting ahead of ‘harvest-now-decrypt-later’: Post-quantum cryptography planning

Opinion piece urges organizations to begin post-quantum cryptography migration now, citing harvest-now-decrypt-later risk and NIST deadlines.

CSO Online outlines why harvest-now-decrypt-later makes long-lived sensitive data a current risk even before quantum computers exist. It cites NIST IR 8547 timelines deprecating RSA-2048 and ECC P-256 by 2030 and removing them by 2035, finalized FIPS standards ML-KEM, ML-DSA, and SLH-DSA, upcoming FN-DSA (FIPS 206), NSA requirements for national security systems from 2027, and UK NCSC phased guidance through 2035. The author recommends cryptographic discovery, crypto-agility, and prioritizing long-confidentiality data and TLS endpoints.

CSO Online·Sep 10, 09:00 UTC · 6d agoResearch