Toward the application of blind quantum computing: a case study

As quantum computing technology matures, an asymmetric computational landscape is emerging where powerful quantum data centers serve users with limited quantum capabilities. The Quantum Internet will enable users to access remote quantum resources, but this delegation raises privacy and trust concerns when the server cannot be assumed to be fully trusted. In this work, we study an implementation-oriented case study in which a Blind Quantum Computing (BQC) protocol is integrated with the encoding stage of a quanvolutional feature extractor for image classification. The goal is to evaluate how an existing BQC-compatible remote state preparation mechanism behaves when used inside a hybrid Quantum Machine Learning workflow. The client encodes classical pixel values as private rotation angles, while fresh random masks hide these angles from an honest-but-curious server at the protocol level. The quantum preprocessing is simulated with finite-shot computational-basis measurements in SquidASM/NetSquid, rather than ideal expectation values, and is evaluated on a small MNIST subset selected for computational feasibility. We analyze the resulting trade-offs among finite-shot sampling, communication and entanglement overhead, depolarizing link and device noise, seed sensitivity, and random-circuit complexity. The study provides practical evidence on the resource and performance constraints that arise when embedding BQC primitives into quantum machine-learning applications, and identifies limitations that must be addressed before deployment-oriented privacy-preserving QML can be considered practical.