BadQubits: An LLM-Based Framework for Static Pre-Execution Detection of Structurally Harmful Quantum Circuits

Abstract

This paper presents BadQubits, an LLM-based framework for static pre-execution detection of structurally harmful OpenQASM 2.0 circuits. The framework targets physical-execution-layer threats by analyzing submitted circuits prior to runtime, where dynamic inspection is constrained by measurement irreversibility and the exponential cost of classical quantum-state simulation. We evaluate four code-understanding LLM architectures on a dataset of 1,500 circuits consisting of 1,000 benign programs from MQTBench[33] and 500 synthetic attack circuits derived from three documented physical-layer threat primitives. Our fine-tuned Qwen Coder 2.5 7B model achieves 92.67% classification accuracy and 96.1% harmful-circuit recall. Two of the four evaluated base models fail to generalize under constrained LoRA fine-tuning, indicating that architecture-aware model selection is a necessary design consideration rather than a minor tuning choice. To characterize what the detector has learned, we compare it against a bag-of-gates CNN under progressive confound removal and adversarial syntactic perturbation. The CNN's harmful-circuit recall drops from 100% to 17%, while the fine-tuned LLM decreases only from 96.1% to 91.2%. We attribute this gap to the sequential structure retained in token-level LLM inputs but discarded by histogram-based baselines. A correlation analysis further shows that model decisions track threat-defining features, specifically SWAP density and measurement timing, rather than generator-specific artifacts such as register naming.