Quantum Entropy-Derived Hybrid Encryption with Hardware-Bound Key Locking via a GPS-Signature Physical Unclonable Function on a Superconducting Quantum Processor

We present a hybrid encryption scheme in which cryptographic key material is derived from quantum shot noise generated by a superconducting quantum processor (IQM Garnet, 20 qubits) and subsequently locked to a device-specific Physical Unclonable Function (PUF) response. The PUF challenge is defined by the cross-resonance ZZ-coupling characteristic frequency φ* = 0.873 rad, at which the gate-pulse settling time τ* = 5.0 µs maximises the gate-polarisation signal (GPS). A fuzzy commitment scheme operating on two GPS-derived features (gps_mean, gps_std) produces a 192-bit feature hash used to lock the AES-256-GCM session key via XOR. We demonstrate a complete encrypt→decrypt cycle on IQM Garnet hardware, recovering the plaintext "hello world" with cryptographic checksum verification. All five principal security claims are experimentally supported on hardware.