March 19, 2026 -- Imagine you have written the core logic of a video game and want to share it with artists and designers to bring it to life. You could hand them the full source code, but if anyone in that chain is malicious, they could steal it, modify it, and sell it as their own. What you really need is a way to let people run your program without ever being able to see how it works.

That problem, known as obfuscation, has occupied computer scientists for decades. Solving it for classical computers was hard enough. Solving it for quantum computers was thought to be even more challenging.

Miryam Mi-Ying Huang may have taken an important step toward doing exactly that.

Huang, a PhD candidate in computer science at USC Viterbi, recently won the Machtey Award for Best Student Paper at the 2025 IEEE Symposium on Foundations of Computer Science, one of the most competitive honors in theoretical computer science. The award goes each year to the strongest research paper authored entirely by students. Huang is the first USC PhD student to win it.

A Problem Nobody Had Solved

Huang’s paper, co-authored with Er-Cheng Tang, a PhD student at the University of Washington, tackles one of the central unsolved problems in quantum cryptography: how to hide the inner workings of a quantum program while still allowing others to run it.

“Our paper is the first to show that you can obfuscate a very broad class of quantum programs,” Huang said. “Today’s understanding of quantum cryptography feels similar to where classical cryptography once stood decades ago. With this work, we take a step toward achieving program obfuscation in the fully quantum setting.”

The implications stretch well beyond gaming analogies. In a world where quantum computers are becoming a reality, protecting the intellectual property embedded in quantum programs or securing sensitive computations depends on solving exactly this kind of cryptographic tool.

How They Did It

Huang and Tang first proposed a new definition tailored to quantum settings, because quantum attackers can have additional power, and all classical definitions cannot work. Then, they built their framework by combining three technical ingredients in a novel way. They developed a method to protect a quantum program’s internal state while still allowing authorized computations to run on it. They created a new way to represent quantum circuits that makes the program’s behavior easier to analyze without exposing its logic. And they used a technique called quantum teleportation to handle programs that take quantum inputs and produce quantum outputs. Finally, they give a rigorous mathematical proof for the obfuscation construction of combining these three elements.

The result is an obfuscated quantum program that does exactly what it is supposed to do, without giving anyone the ability to extract more information from it than intended.

The People Behind the Work

Huang credits her advisor, Assistant Professor Jiapeng Zhang of the Thomas Lord Department of Computer Science at USC Viterbi and the School of Advanced Computing, with giving her the room to pursue an ambitious problem from the start.

“I have been working on this problem since I was a first-year student,” Huang said. “Professor Zhang gave me the freedom to pursue ambitious problems. That freedom allowed me to explore bold ideas without fear of failure.”

Zhang, who does not work directly in quantum cryptography, offered consistent feedback and encouragement throughout.

“I have worked with many students, and Miryam is a very special one,” Zhang said. “There are actually fewer and fewer people who can focus on truly challenging problems for a long time.”

Professor Andrea Coladangelo at the University of Washington hosted Huang during a research visit where many of the paper’s key improvements took shape. Professor Huijia Rachel Lin also helped strengthen the team’s background in program obfuscation. Huang is also grateful to the broader USC theory group, including faculty members Shaddin Dughmi, David Kempe, Haipeng Luo, Vatsal Sharan, and Shang-Hua Teng, whose engagement pushed her thinking throughout the project.

What Comes Next

Huang plans to continue pursuing an academic career, with a focus on theoretical cryptography and complexity theory. She is also increasingly interested in the relationship between cryptography and AI, an area she believes will only grow in relevance.

The road to the Machtey Award was not a straight line. Huang originally set out to solve a more ambitious version of the problem, but had to reshape it into something more tractable. In the follow-up work presented this year, Huang and Tang obtained the obfuscation for arbitrary quantum circuits in an idealized model, which can hide any arbitrary quantum computation.

“That experience reminded me that pursuing difficult questions with persistence and flexibility can sometimes lead to unexpected progress,” she said.

For a question first posed in 1976 and later raised for quantum computing, that feels like an understatement.