BT and Toshiba announced the two companies will build and trial the world’s first commercially available thatquantum secured metro network.
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The brand new network will connect sites in London’s Docklands, the City and the M4 Corridor, and will provide data services secured using Quantum Key Distribution (QKD) and Post Quantum Cryptography (PQC).
The new network, which is the world’s first commercial trial of a quantum network infrastructure, will be operated by BT, who will provide a range of quantum secured services including dedicated high bandwidth end to end encrypted links, delivered over Openreach’s Optical Spectrum Access Filter Connect (OSA FC) solution for private fibre networks.
The QKD links will be provided using a quantum network that includes both core and access components, and will be integrated into BT’s existing network management operations. Toshiba will provide quantum key distribution hardware and key management software.
The pace of progress in Quantum computers presents an increasing risk to standard encrypted key exchanges, authentication and digital signatures; some estimates suggest that quantum computer enabled security attacks are possible within 5 years, and likely to occur within 10 years.
Securing encrypted traffic is a pressing problem today, because data which requires long term security could be at risk of ‘store today, crack later’ attacks, in which the key exchange and encrypted traffic are stored now and broken when a sufficiently powerful quantum computer is available.
QKD based security is unique because the key exchange is secure against any computational or mathematical advance, therefore it is immune to any present or future attacks by quantum computers.
London is an ideal environment to deploy and trial this technology thanks to the density of customers whose data is extremely sensitive and requires utmost security, such as financial and legal institutions.
The two companies’ initial focus will be to provide trials for enterprise customers who are carrying sensitive traffic (such as database backups) between sites, and to explore potential future offerings such as encrypted links and “quantum keys as a serviceâ€. ■