The IEEE QUILLS workshop returns for its third edition, continuing the conversation begun two years ago on the security, privacy, and trust challenges of an emerging quantum information and computing ecosystem. Since last year's workshop, quantum computing has continued its transition beyond the noisy intermediate-scale quantum (NISQ) era, and fault-tolerant quantum computing (FTQC) now looks less like a distant aspiration than an observable engineering trajectory. Building on Google Willow's 2024 below-threshold demonstration, the early error-correction era has matured across architecturally distinct pathways—USTC's Zuchongzhi 3.2 reached below threshold via all-microwave control, IBM delivered its Nighthawk processor and previewed qLDPC-based fault-tolerance architectures with Loon, and neutral-atom, photonic, and silicon-spin platforms converge on the same threshold, with several groups now demonstrating logical qubits.

Today's short-code-distance devices cannot yet run the billion-gate circuits that cryptographically relevant applications such as Shor's factoring algorithm demand. But with below-threshold demonstrations now arriving from multiple platforms within a single year, the gap is narrowing faster than earlier roadmaps assumed, and Q-Day may be closer than previously anticipated. In the meantime, quantum machine learning (QML) has grown increasingly relevant as the first logical circuits deploy, bridging the NISQ and FTQC eras across molecular design, materials discovery, financial optimization, and real-time anomaly detection.

This maturation sharpens the focus on quantum security and cryptanalysis that has anchored QUILLS since its inception. With Shor-capable hardware on the horizon, public-key cryptography such as RSA and elliptic-curve cryptography faces mounting risk, and post-quantum cryptography (PQC) has moved from research into enterprise migration: beyond the first finalized NIST standards, the code-based mechanism HQC was selected in March 2025 and FN-DSA (FALCON) advances toward finalization as FIPS 206, deliberately diversifying the portfolio's mathematical foundations. The "harvest now, decrypt later" threat continues to compress timelines even before a cryptographically relevant machine exists. Beyond cryptography, the security of quantum devices themselves remains central, as tomography-based attacks, QML model theft, and denial-of-service vulnerabilities grow more consequential with powerful FTQC-capable systems.

Quantum computers will, for the foreseeable future, likely be accessed remotely. Recent progress in quantum networking—entanglement distribution, teleported logic across fiber, and modular architectures—points toward a near future where quantum networks link powerful cloud-based servers with smaller client systems including quantum computers and quantum sensors. While these networks will enable quantum cloud computing and distributed quantum sensing, they also amplify challenges of trust, privacy, and security: protecting proprietary algorithms and quantum data for clients, defending against hardware- and network-based attacks for providers, and preserving the privacy of local information in distributed sensing. Software- and hardware-level countermeasures grow more essential—from blind and secure delegated quantum computation, entanglement distillation, quantum network coding, and restrictions on pulse-level access, to private distributed sensing. Building on the foundations of our first and second editions, this third edition of IEEE QUILLS will explore how emerging fault-tolerant hardware, a maturing PQC landscape, cryptanalysis, and quantum networking together define the secure and scalable quantum ecosystem of 2026 and beyond. The workshop will feature both invited and contributed talks.

Call for Papers

We invite submissions of previously unpublished works broadly in the areas of quantum computing, quantum machine learning, quantum networks, cybersecurity, and their interplay. Topics of interest include but are not limited to the following:

• Quantum computation

  • Error correction and Error mitigation

  • Distributed quantum computing and quantum data center architectures

  • NISQ and fault-tolerant applications

  • Quantum algorithms

  • Blind quantum computation

• Quantum machine learning (QML)

  • QML algorithms

  • QML applications

  • Quantum optimization (e.g., QAOA)

  • QML model security

  • Quantum data security

• Quantum networking, Applications, & Cybersecurity

  • Quantum repeaters, switches, routers

  • Private distributed quantum sensing

  • Quantum private queries and private information retrieval

  • Quantum Key Distribution

  • Post quantum cryptography

Submission Deadline and Guidelines

• Deadline: August 22nd, 2026

• Notification of decision: September 20th, 2026

• Camera Ready due: September 30th, 2026

• Paper Submission: EasyChair

Organizing Committee 

General Chair: Rob Cunningham, University of Pittsburgh

Program Committee

Co-Chair: Kaushik P. Seshadreesan, University of Pittsburgh

Co-Chair: Junyu Liu, University of Pittsburgh

Bruno Ricardi de Abreu, Pittsburgh Supercomputing Center

Kishor Bharti, A*STAR Singapore

Alessandro Cilardo, University of Naples Federico II, Italy

Karim Eldefrawy, SRI International

Edoardo Giusto, University of Naples Federico II, Italy

Zhiding Liang, Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute

Paul Lopata, University of Maryland

Elham Kashefi, Sorbonne Universite

Eneet Kaur, Cisco

Di Luo, MIT

Atul Mantri, Virginia Tech

Michele Mosca, University of Waterloo

Yuxiang Peng, Purdue University

Jeff Prevost, University of Texas at San Antonio

Kaitlin Smith, Northwestern University

Runzhou Tao, University of Maryland

Hanrui Wang, MIT

Di Wu, University of Central Florida

Xiaochuan Wu, University of Chicago

Peng Zhao, Cisco

Quntao Zhuang, University of Southern California