In a statement to the Australian Stock Exchange, Melbourne-based Senetas said the joint development effort began in the second half of last year with the objective of developing a quantum key distribution system for the generation and secure exchange of crypto keys over fiber optic networks, using its Layer-2 encryption technology for security at data rates of up to 10Gbps.
Gregoire Ribordy, CEO of Geneva-based ID Quantique, said the five-year-old company’s expertise is in applications of quantum photonics. Though it was formed primarily for quantum cryptography, he went on, ID Quantique realized the market was too immature when it first came into existence and so developed other applications such as single photon detectors for R&D labs and random number generation for lotteries and gaming sites.
The collaboration with Senetas thus beefs up the Swiss company’s offering in what it sees as its largest market opportunity, i.e. quantum cryptography, for which conditions are starting to come together, in terms of the deployment of more high-bandwidth networks.
Perhaps a better name for what we do is really QKD, in that we can distribute keys and verify, post-transmission, whether they have been intercepted. If they have not, which we can determine by the number of errors in a sequence, we can then use the sequence to secure data, he explained. We do the distribution, but we are not in the high-speed encryption business, so we brought together our QKD expertise with Senetas’ network encryption capability.
In essence, Ribordy went on, the collaboration involved a cable between our box, as the key server, and their box, which essentially asks for keys. In other words, Senetas provides the high-speed conventional encryption, at Layer 2, of the quantum keys during their transmission, then they in turn are used to encrypt the actual data, once it has been determined that they have not been intercepted.
He added that each company will market the combined offering into their respective markets, which in ID Quantique’s case is the highly regulated European private sector, such as financial services and healthcare, as well as government and military. Senetas targets the Australian market under its own steam, as well as the international market through partners, the principal one being with US encryption market leader SafeNet Inc.
