ObfusQate: Unveiling the First Quantum Program Obfuscation Framework

We introduce ObfusQate, a novel framework that performs software obfuscation using quantum primitives to enhance the security of both classical and quantum programs. ObfusQate implements eight obfuscation techniques categorized into quantum circuit-level and code-level transformations. Circuit-level obfuscation leverages quantum gates, identity operations, and unitary transformations to construct non-intuitive circuits that resist reverse engineering. Code-level obfuscation employs quantum-based opaque predicates to obscure control flow, making execution paths unpredictable. We evaluate the effectiveness of ObfusQate using three benchmark quantum algorithms: Bernstein-Vazirani, Shor’s, and QAOA. Experiments show that the framework incurs tunable polynomial overhead in both time and space, while preserving functional correctness. Additionally, we demonstrate an offensive use case by embedding a keylogger into Shor’s algorithm. Large language models (GPT-4o, GPT-o3-mini, and Grok-3) successfully identified the payload in the unobfuscated version, but failed when it was obfuscated using ObfusQate. To our knowledge, ObfusQate is the first automated system for quantum software obfuscation. It provides a foundation for secure deployment of quantum software in adversarial and shared environments.