Security discussions in quantum software projects on GitHub

Quantum software engineering is an emerging field that leverages quantum computing and software development to address contemporary computational challenges. A significant concern in this domain is security, which has become a critical issue in quantum software engineering. Despite advances in quantum computing security, there is a lack of empirical evidence examining the primary security concerns of developers within the context of quantum software engineering. This paper presents a study that identifies, describes, and analyzes topics discussed by developers regarding open and closed issues of quantum software projects hosted on GitHub. Of the 18 identified projects, 2,264 filtered open and closed issues were obtained, of which 294 (13%) were related to security. Using the Latent Dirichlet Allocation algorithm, 15 topics were identified. Furthermore, we identified the key security concerns that developers addressed in the issues, the majority of which were oriented towards code failure, noise and modular validation. This study serves as a precedent for a practical analysis of the identification and characterization of security topics, as well as the initial insights into security design decisions that developers discuss in quantum software projects.