The 2025 Albany Nanotechnology Symposium, hosted at the Albany Nanotech Complex and supported by RPI, brought together researchers across quantum computing, microelectronics, materials, and semiconductor manufacturing. The symposium emphasized cross-disciplinary innovation in advanced hardware, fabrication, and secure computing, creating a platform for academic groups, national labs, and leading industry researchers from companies such as IBM and Xanadu to present emerging results on novel computing systems. With a strong emphasis on next-generation semiconductor technologies and reliable, scalable computing infrastructures, the event highlighted the critical role of hardware-centric research in shaping the future of high-performance and quantum systems.
At the symposium, ECSE PhD student Navnil Choudhury (a member of the Trustworthy and Intelligent Embedded Systems Lab led by Dr. Kanad Basu) presented a poster titled "Security of Quantum Computing," which examines cross-layer vulnerabilities in today’s cloud-accessible quantum computers. The work detailed how multi-tenant access, noisy intermediate-scale hardware, and unavoidable crosstalk open hardware-, software-, and system-level attack surfaces, including passive side-channel leakage, state-flipping fault injection, compiler-level manipulation, and circuit reconstruction attacks. He outlined how these threats emerge in real superconducting platforms and discussed the need for verifiable compilers, hardened device architectures, and secure quantum-as-a-service models. The poster committee was impressed with Navnil’s research and his presentation. They awarded him the First Prize in the poster competition—an encouraging recognition of the importance of quantum-security research.