Guardians of the Quantum GAN

Quantum Generative Adversarial Networks (qGANs) are at the forefront of image-generating quantum machine learning models. To accommodate the growing demand for Noisy Intermediate-Scale Quantum (NISQ) devices to train and infer quantum machine learning models, the number of third-party vendors offering quantum hardware as a service is expected to rise. This expansion introduces the risk of untrusted vendors potentially stealing proprietary information from the quantum machine learning models. To address this concern we propose a novel watermarking technique that exploits the noise signature embedded during the training phase of qGANs as a non-invasive watermark. The watermark is identifiable in the images generated by the qGAN allowing us to trace the specific quantum hardware used during training hence providing strong proof of ownership. To further enhance the security robustness, we propose the training of qGANs on a sequence of multiple quantum hardware, embedding a complex watermark comprising the noise signatures of all the training hardware that is difficult for adversaries to replicate. We also develop a machine learning classifier to extract this watermark robustly, thereby identifying the training hardware (or the suite of hardware) from the images generated by the qGAN validating the authenticity of the model. We note that the watermark signature is robust against inferencing on hardware different than the hardware that was used for training. We obtain watermark extraction accuracy of 100% and ~90% for training the qGAN on individual and multiple quantum hardware setups (and inferencing on different hardware), respectively. Since parameter evolution during training is strongly modulated by quantum noise, the proposed watermark can be extended to other quantum machine learning models as well.