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Toshiba's Quantum Technology headquarters.(Source: Toshiba)
Toshiba announced the launch of its new quantum-safe networking (QSN) platform, saying it offers more scalability, flexibility and efficiency in building networks protected from future quantum computer-enabled security threats. It is aimed at network operators, data center service providers, enterprises and public-sector organizations.
QSN was designed as a suite of products that can be used to build scalable networks, said Andrew Shields, vice president and general manager of Toshiba's Quantum Technology division, during an interview with Light Reading.
"It matches very closely the architecture that you would have in a telco network," Shields said, which means it can be used to create a large-scale network, as opposed to the current approach, which relies on point-to-point connections.
The QSN platform is designed for deployments of different sizes, from a single dedicated connection to large metro, hub-and-spoke, ring, mesh and long-distance networks, the company said in a press release.
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The QSN platform. (Source: Toshiba)
Telcos and other organizations can "provide this fundamental protection and expand as their strategy, or their capex or the market requirements dictate, very easily and very efficiently," said Lee Johnson, Toshiba's quantum key distribution (QKD) business development manager, during the interview.
The platform combines different technologies that are used for quantum-safe communications, including post-quantum cryptography (PQC), which uses cryptographic algorithms designed to resist attacks from future quantum computers, and QKD, a more hardware-intensive method that uses the principles of quantum physics to distribute encryption keys.
A customer can choose the mix of technologies they want to use, whether hybrid keys based on multiple technologies, or PQC or QKD only, Shields said.
Scaling up
"One of the advantages of the new platform … is currently for QKD we need to have hardware at either end of each fiber," Shields said. "But in the new platform we'll be using optical switching, and that will allow us to serve multiple customers from one box in the exchange."
With current technology, each customer would have to have a separate box in an exchange to establish the hardware link. With the new platform, however, a single hardware box could serve 100 or 1,000 customers, Shields said.
"It saves a lot of size, weight and power rack space within the exchange, and also the cost of the hardware is shared between different customers," he explained.
Cost of QKD is considered one of the obstacles to broader deployment and uptake.
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The idea, Shields said, is to build a core network in some of a telco's exchanges with new customers connecting into one of them. "That's how you build a scalable network, and that really mimics the way an ordinary telco network works," he said.
The QSN platform will be used as part of Toshiba's existing partnership with Orange, which has used the vendor's QKD technology to deploy a quantum-safe network for (unnamed) commercial customers. "We'll be adding this technology to that network to allow us to scale out," Shields said.
Quantum threat
In the future, quantum computers are expected to break algorithms like RSA that are commonly used for encryption. This means that sensitive data will need new types of protection to ensure it's safe. In the US, the National Institute for Standards and Technology (NIST) identified PQC algorithms considered quantum-safe and set 2035 as the deadline for full migration, with the UK and EU following suit.
Any data that is likely to remain sensitive for a number of years is, however, generally considered to be at risk of being collected today and decrypted later when technology permits.
"It's going to be a meandering path to get to quantum-safe networking, and it's going to take time," Johnson said, adding that it's critical to have a strategy for the transition, identifying, for example, the most vulnerable parts of a network and how they are protected.
Several telcos in Europe have started to offer quantum-safe communications services. Orange is offering its Quantum Defender solution, while BT has launched a QKD network in London, also in partnership with Toshiba. Meanwhile, Telefónica has conducted QKD pilots connecting healthcare or law enforcement facilities in Spain.
Individual QKD networks are starting to scale into country- or region-wide solutions, Shields said, citing China and Japan along with the EU's EuroQCI project. The latter is being led by Deutsche Telekom and is intended to eventually secure government data across the EU with QKD, with the help of the bloc's prepared IRIS2 satellite constellation.
At the moment, a single QKD link is limited in distance to a maximum of 150 kilometers, Shields acknowledged. He said, however, that this is enough for exchanges to be connected without intermediate boxes.
"We can build national networks at the minute, and even continental networks," Shields said, adding that satellite can be used to "link together different fiber networks in different parts of the world."