Success for KETS in Canada-UK Quantum Technologies projects
KETS is extremely excited to reveal that we are one of eight successful Canada-UK Quantum Technologies projects announced today at the UK National Quantum Technologies Showcase which were selected jointly by InnovateUK and the National Sciences and Engineering Research Council of Canada (NSERC). These projects follow an agreement signed between the two nations in 2017 to share quantum expertise through academic and business collaborations and are the culmination of global expert exchange missions between the UK and Canada in 2018.
In Nov 2018, I had the privilege, together with Jane Garrett, of showing off our amazingly successful Quantum Technology Enterprise Centre that we have built in Bristol when the Canadian delegation visited – it was great to visit with a large group of Canucks!
Our project is named “Building a standardised quantum-safe networking architecture”. It builds on the already rich heritage of UK and Canadian efforts in quantum communications technologies by bringing together experts from academia, industry, and government with experience in quantum encryption hardware, post-quantum software, and commercial encryption solutions.
Here in the UK the project is led by us at KETS Quantum Security Ltd in close partnership with QETLabs at the University of Bristol, while the Canadian side is led by the Institute for Quantum Computing at the University of Waterloo with Crypto4a, Rhea Group, QEYNet and other partners.
Our vision of this project is to bring these quantum-safe technologies together to:
- develop and define a QKD network software library and hardware integration standard for all types of physical systems (fibre, free-space, satellite, etc),
- develop a new integrated QKD-HSM appliance as a key component of a quantum-safe network fabric,
- and develop a first proof-of-principle quantum-safe network implementation in order to prepare for Canadian and UK QKD networks to be connected in the future.
The end goal of this project is to provide commercial businesses and governments a common quantum-safe network standard and abstraction layer, which they can use to build required higher level applications on top of, such as websites and e-commerce platforms. Crucially, this new network will ensure their security is quantum-safe and their communications are interoperable with other organisations.
If you would like to learn more about the project or get involved in the Proof-of-Concepts and Field Trials planned, please get in touch!
Chris Erven, November 2020