Verifiable blind probabilistic error cancellation

2026-07-28

AI Summary

This work addresses the lack of end-to-end security guarantees for quantum error mitigation on untrusted quantum hardware by proposing the first verifiable blind quantum error mitigation protocol secure against fully malicious adversaries. By embedding probabilistic error cancellation (PEC) within an abstract cryptographic framework and integrating trap-based verification with statistical hypothesis testing, the protocol achieves composable security and perfect blindness. It incurs no additional quantum memory overhead, exhibits exponentially small security error, and accepts correctly mitigated outcomes with high probability. This significantly enhances both the security and practicality of delegated quantum computations on near-term quantum devices.

Abstract

Quantum error mitigation (QEM) is an essential tool for mitigating hardware noise without incurring space overhead. Yet, its reliability depends on modeling, calibration, and implementation, leaving end-to-end security on untrusted quantum hardware unresolved. We address this problem by introducing verifiable blind probabilistic error cancellation (VBPEC), the first secure verification protocol against a fully malicious adversary that integrates QEM. VBPEC brings probabilistic error cancellation (PEC), a widely studied QEM technique, within the scope of composable security by formalizing delegated mitigation as a cryptographic resource in the abstract cryptography framework. The protocol performs PEC with perfect blindness and an exponentially small security error. VBPEC retains the absence of quantum-space overhead from recent statistically-secure verified quantum computation protocols and from PEC. The only overhead takes the form of additional repetitions due to the QEM procedure. To achieve this, we extend trap-based verification from deterministic pass/fail checks to statistical tests that benefit from QEM and develop a new proof technique that integrates the corresponding additional deviation sources. Rather than merely tolerating honest noise below a fixed threshold, VBPEC actively cancels it, enabling correctly mitigated estimates to be accepted with high probability without compromising security. Our framework thus establishes an essential route towards secure, reliable, and practical delegated quantum computation on near-future quantum hardware: VBPEC fundamentally improves the practicality of verification.

Problem

• quantum error mitigation
• verifiable blind computation
• delegated quantum computation
• composable security
• probabilistic error cancellation

Innovation

• verifiable blind probabilistic error cancellation
• quantum error mitigation
• composable security
• trap-based verification
• delegated quantum computation