New SRI research seeks to secure the future of quantum innovation by extending software assurance capabilities from classical computers to quantum information systems.
For decades, SRI has been securing computer systems by advancing a discipline known as software assurance. SRI’s foundational work in formal methods, for example, played a critical role in proving that Cold War-era national security software could be trusted to perform reliably in all circumstances.
Today, applying cutting-edge automated theorem provers like SMT solvers, researchers in SRI’s Computer Science Laboratory continue to find bugs and understand hidden vulnerabilities in critical software systems.
“There has been relatively little work done on the symbolic analysis of quantum information systems.” — Chris Connolly
But the advanced math that makes all of this possible isn’t going to work on tomorrow’s quantum information systems.
“There has been relatively little work done on the symbolic analysis of quantum information systems,” observes Chris Connolly, a senior principal computer scientist at SRI.
Today, he says, this “assurance gap” is mostly impacting state-of-the-art work on quantum key distribution, which is a core component of quantum cryptography. But eventually, it’s a problem that will need to be solved for all future quantum information systems, from quantum sensing to quantum computers.
Today’s assurance tools, Connolly explains, work by symbolically representing integers and real numbers. This allows researchers to model how a software program will function under all possible input conditions. The approach functions brilliantly for classical computing. But to model a quantum system, you need to symbolically represent much more complicated mathematical formulations, such as complex numbers, matrices, and vectors.
Does symbolic analysis of quantum information systems scale? No one knows, hence why Connolly and his fellow researchers are moving forward with an internally funded SRI research project called Building Logic Algorithms with Quantum for Threat Interception and Evasion (BLAQ-TIE).
“A big part of the work will be to extend our to our existing tools and get a jump on this question, so we can handle both the quantum side and the classical side of system assurance,” Connolly notes.
But this research isn’t just about computer science. Proposed solutions will need to be tested on real-world quantum behavior. To complement the modeling work in SRI’s Computer Science Laboratory, SRI’s Applied Physics Laboratory will bring a wealth of experience in cutting-edge quantum systems, providing both the hardware and the technical knowledge that will enable computer scientists to run physics-grounded experiments.
“Because we can set up physical test beds, our CSL colleagues will be able to make real progress on understanding how various approaches to symbolic simulation do or don’t prove the robustness of quantum information systems and hybrid systems,” comments Cale Gentry, a principal research scientist in SRI’s Applied Physics Laboratory. “As quantum computing and other quantum information systems move from the lab to the real world, we need to be anticipating and addressing potential vulnerabilities. This project represents an opportunity for SRI to make an early impact on a problem that’s going to become more important with every passing year.”
Learn more about how SRI is advancing the future of quantum.
