An End-to-End Threat Model for the Quantum-as-a-Service Pipeline

Computer Science > Cryptography and Security [Submitted on 6 Aug 2026] An End-to-End Threat Model for the Quantum-as-a-Service Pipeline Badhon Rahman, Majid Haghparast, Tommi Mikkonen Cloud-based accessing of Quantum-as-a-Service (QaaS) platforms such as IBM Quantum, IonQ Cloud, and Amazon Braket is becoming popular day by day. Hybrid quantum-classical algorithms (VQE, QAOA, QML) transfer data via a long layered pipeline of orchestration, compilation, and execution. Recent works have demonstrated various critical attacks at individual stages: Calibration tampering, SWAP attacks, QubitHammer, and so on. However, these attacks remain separated because of their own terminology, and existing STRIDE-based threat modeling in the context of quantum lacks a structured view towards the QaaS stack itself. We address this concern by decomposing the workflow into six-stage model with STRIDE threat modeling. Our matrix demonstrated attack vectors in quantum-specific, inherited classical, and plausible tiers for each of the stages. We further investigate the underexplored sections (repudiation and elevation-of-privilege) and distinguish three different cross-stage attack chains with higher impacts. Comments: 2 pages, 1 Table. Accepted as a poster paper at the IEEE International Conference on Quantum Computing & Engineering (QCE26) Subjects: Cryptography and Security (cs.CR) Cite as: arXiv:2608.05836 [cs.CR]   (or arXiv:2608.05836v1 [cs.CR] for this version)   https://doi.org/10.48550/arXiv.2608.05836 Focus to learn more Submission history From: Badhon Rahman [view email] [v1] Thu, 6 Aug 2026 10:04:59 UTC (6 KB) Access Paper: HTML (experimental) view license Current browse context: cs.CR < prev   |   next > new | recent | 2026-08 Change to browse by: cs References & Citations NASA ADS Google Scholar Semantic Scholar Export BibTeX Citation Bookmark Bibliographic Tools Bibliographic and Citation Tools Bibliographic Explorer Toggle Bibliographic Explorer (What is the Explorer?) Connected Papers Toggle Connected Papers (What is Connected Papers?) Litmaps Toggle Litmaps (What is Litmaps?) scite.ai Toggle scite Smart Citations (What are Smart Citations?) Code, Data, Media Demos Related Papers About arXivLabs Which authors of this paper are endorsers? | Disable MathJax (What is MathJax?)