Quantum machine learning (QML) is a category of algorithms that employ
variational quantum circuits (VQCs) to tackle machine learning tasks. Recent
discoveries have shown that QML models can effectively generalize from limited
training data samples. This capability has sparked increased interest in
deploying these models to address practical, real-world challenges, resulting
in the emergence of Quantum Machine Learning as a Service (QMLaaS). QMLaaS
represents a hybrid model that utilizes both classical and quantum computing
resources. Classical computers play a crucial role in this setup, handling
initial pre-processing and subsequent post-processing of data to compensate for
the current limitations of quantum hardware. Since this is a new area, very
little work exists to paint the whole picture of QMLaaS in the context of known
security threats in the domain of classical and quantum machine learning. This
SoK paper is aimed to bridge this gap by outlining the complete QMLaaS
workflow, which encompasses both the training and inference phases and
highlighting significant security concerns involving untrusted classical or
quantum providers. QML models contain several sensitive assets, such as the
model architecture, training/testing data, encoding techniques, and trained
parameters. Unauthorized access to these components could compromise the
model's integrity and lead to intellectual property (IP) theft. We pinpoint the
critical security issues that must be considered to pave the way for a secure
QMLaaS deployment.