Building a standardised quantum-safe networking architecture

Quantum computing has moved from academic labs to commercialization and start-ups are making rapid, demonstrable progress as evidenced by new and emerging product and service offerings. While this is good news for advances in things like quantum chemistry and simulation, it also means that the \`quantum threat' to our current cryptographic methods is getting closer by the day.

Quantum Key Distribution (QKD) and Post Quantum Cryptography (PQC) are quantum-safe cyber security tools that are resilient against the computational threats of quantum computing. These tools are typically not used on their own, but instead, are sub-components of larger secure networks and broader cybersecurity product offerings.

Building on the already rich heritage of UK and Canadian efforts into quantum communications technologies, our vision in this project is to bring these 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 (hardware security module) 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.

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 then use to build their required higher level applications on top of, such as websites and e-commerce platforms, while ensuring their security is quantum-safe and the communication is interoperable with other organisations.