Performing Distributed Quantum Calculations in a Multi-cloud Architecture Secured by the Quantum Key Distribution Protocol

SN Computer Science (2024) 5:410 https://doi.org/10.1007/s42979-024-02761-0 ORIGINAL RESEARCH Performing Distributed Quantum Calculations in a Multi‑cloud Architecture Secured by the Quantum Key Distribution Protocol Jose Luis Lo Huang1 · Vincent C. Emeakaroha1 Received: 28 November 2023 / Accepted: 29 February 2024 © The Author(s) 2024 Abstract Quantum computing (QC) is an emerging area that yearly improves and develops more advances in the number of qubits and the available infrastructure for public users. Nowadays, the main cloud service providers (CSP) are implementing different mechanisms to support access to their quantum computers, which can be used to perform small experiments, test hybrid algorithms and prove quantum theories. Recent research work have discussed the low capacity of using quantum computers in a single CSP to perform quantum computation that are needed to solve different experiments for real world problems. Thus, there are needs for computing powers in the form of qubits from multi-cloud environment. Quantum computing in a multi-cloud environment requires security of the communicating channels. A well known algorithm in quantum cryptography for this purpose is the quantum key distribution (QKD) protocol. This enables the sender and receiver of a message to know when a third party eavesdropped any data from the insecure quantum channel. To address the low capacity issue, this research develops and tests the use of heterogeneous quantum computers located on different CSP to distribute quantum calculations between them by leveraging the channel security provided by the QKD protocol. The achieved results show over 88.1% of correct distributed quantum computation results without error correction methods, 96.8% of correct distributed quantum computation results using error correction methods and over 98.8% correct authorisation detection in multi-cloud environments. This demonstrates that quantum calculations can be distributed between different CSP while securing the channel with the QKD protocol at the same time. Keywords Multi-cloud · Quantum computing · QKD protocol · Data lake · Quaternions · Cloud computing Introduction In recent times, cloud computing has become a matured area where companies and users can run their workloads leveraging on flexible cloud service provider (CSP) infrastructures and paying only for what they actually use in an on-demand consumption and payment method. Currently the main CSP such as Amazon Web Services (AWS)1, Microsoft Azure2, This article is part of the topical collection “Recent Trends on Cloud Computing and Services Science” guest edited by Claus Pahl and Maarten van Steen. * Vincent C. Emeakaroha Jose Luis Lo Huang 1 Department of Computer Science, Munster Technological University, Cork, Munster, Ireland Google Cloud (GCP)3 or IBM Cloud4 are offering multiple services to the public that enable an exponential advance in the technology industry, as the users now can focus more on the business use cases and less on the infrastructure set up. Among the services offered by these CSP is the quantum computing scheduling and runtime. Research has shown the inability of a single CSP to provide enough quantum computing power for meaningful real world experiments [1]. Therefore, efforts have been geared towards the use of multiple cloud infrastructures to achieve optimised quantum computation. Moreover, quantum computing (QC) is having significant advances based on prototypes of quantum machines on cloud infrastructures that can execute workloads that would take a large amount of time in conventional computers [2, 1 2 3 4 https://aws.amazon.com/. https://azure.microsoft.com/en-us/. https://cloud.google.com/. https://www.ibm.com/cloud. SN Computer Science Vol.:(0123456789) 410 Page 2 of 13 3]. A quantum bit (or qubit) is the smallest unit of quantum information, which is usually represented by an atom’s state, electron, photon or other elementary particle. Unlike a classical bit, a quantum bit can exist in superposition states (both 0 and 1 at the same time with different probabilities) and have more features that permit different approaches not possible with classical computation [4]. With the initial release of these quantum computers located on the different CSP, it is now possible to execute and to test a good number of protocols and algorithms that before only existed in theory. The quantum key distribution (QKD) protocol is a specialized quantum algorithm that permit to securely send data between two entities through an insecure link. With this protocol, they can detect if someone is trying to capture or is measuring the information that traverse the insecure channel. A good number of researches use quantum computers from one CSP to perform calculations based on hybrid algorithms, for example [5, 6]. However, there is a strict limitation in the number of qubits on each quantum computer. This restrict the possibility to execute bigger experiments that needs more quantum power or qubits. Also, current research efforts are focusing on integrating the QKD protocol into cloud deployments to secure the communications between a single cloud provider and users. However, recent trends have shown the use of multi-cloud deployments to provision services that access data from distributed sources. This trend has brought security issues around distributed computations. The key issues are (1) low number of qubits in a single CSP quantum environment is not helpful in running bigger quantum workloads, (2) insecurity in the distributed calculations due to poor parameter configurations, and (3) interruption by third party if incorrect methods are used in the communication channel. This research proposes a mechanism to distribute quantum calculations between a multi-cloud architecture, consisting of different CSPs while improving the security of their communication channels using the quantum key distribution (QKD) protocol. The achieved results show over 88.1% of correct distributed quantum computation results without error correction methods, 96.8% of correct distributed quantum computation results using error correction methods and over 98.8% correct authorisation detection in multi-cloud environments. The rest of the paper is organised as follows: Sect. 2 discusses the background and related work. In Sect. 3, we discuss the design of the work. Implementation details are provided in Sect. 4. Next, the evaluations are presented in Sect. 5. Finally, Sect. 6 concludes the paper. SN Computer Science Background/Research Context This section highlights key background information and discusses related work. Background Currently, more than 90% of companies have adopted cloud computing as shown in recent surveys [7, 8]. Moreover, companies are increasing the cloud first strategies and cloud native services or technologies. Also, as stated in the same references, the multi-cloud approach is gaining more adepts each year, wit (...truncated)