Quantum Safe Encryption – The Most Vital Technology for Country’s Cyber Defence in the Era of ‘Cyberattack as the First Strike’ and ‘War within a War” Approach

India @75, finds itself at a critical juncture in cybersecurity and is observing increasingly hostile behaviour across an ever-expanding attack surface. Cyber-attacks on Indian critical infrastructure by nation-state bad actors have increased significantly. Today’s national secrets, intelligence information and critical infrastructure is protected through encryption. QNu Labs, India’s first and the only quantum security company, offers their quantum safe products and solutions which are ready for deployment in defence and intelligence networks.

By Sunil Gupta

Admin Special Feature Archive

A common belief in the cybersecurity world is that there are two kinds of enterprises: Those that have been hacked and those that don’t know they’ve been hacked. Cybersecurity is an essential part of doing government or private business these days, and one standard tool to keep hackers at bay is encryption.

Encryption lets you protect data you send, receive, and store, regardless of device, and involves altering text to make it virtually impossible for cybercriminals to read. The text is essentially made unreadable and only those, who have a decryption key can decipher it. It is a must-have for your business, as it allows your employees to safeguard their passwords and other sensitive information against cybercriminals. This approach protects Social Security numbers, bank account information, personal healthcare data and other critical data against cyber-attacks. Therefore, even if hackers steal the data that has been encrypted, they still won’t be able to use it without a decryption key.

Today national secrets, intelligence information and critical infrastructure are protected through encryption.  The encryption key generation algorithms such as RSA and ECC have served us thus far, but the advent of quantum computers will make the current algorithms utterly weak in protecting confidential data and information against the powerful quantum computers. Knowing this, some of the rouge countries have started harvesting and storing confidential data, to break those later using scalable quantum computers and quantum algorithms like Shor and Grover.

 
Cyber-attacks on Indian critical infrastructure by nation-state bad actors have increased significantly and India observed a 70 per cent increase in ransomware activity in the fourth quarter (Q4) of 2021 and in the first 3 months of 2022, the country saw over 1.8 crore cyber-attacks and threats, which means around 200,000 attacks every day. Ferocity and volume of such attacks pose huge risk to the country and if certain vital decisions aren’t taken in the near term to protect the encrypted dat,a it might be too late..

We are at a critical juncture in cybersecurity and are observing increasingly hostile environment with an ever-expanding attack surface. Cyber-attacks on Indian critical infrastructure by nation-state bad actors have increased significantly and India observed a 70 per cent increase in ransomware activity in the fourth quarter (Q4) of 2021. In the first 3 months of 2022, the country saw over 1.8 crore cyber attacks and threats, which means around 200,000 attacks every day. Ferocity and volume of such attacks pose huge risk to the country and  if certain vital decisions aren’t taken in the near term to protect the encrypted data, it might be too late

 

A Bangalore based start-up QNu Labs, India’s first and the only quantum security company has built quantum safe products and solutions which are ready for deployment in defence and intelligence networks.  QNu Labs have built products for quantum key generation, key distribution, and key management. These products leverage principles of quantum mechanics to offer unconditional security. QNu Labs has also leveraged advanced mathematics-based post quantum algorithms for the last mile secure communication.  The below diagram shows the Hybrid stack (Quantum and Post quantum products) for next generation secure encryption services.

 

As part of the iDEX program, Indian Army will issue an RFP to QNu Labs to procure a set of QKD nodes to test and deploy the quantum technology over 400Kms of the communication network.  While this is a great first step to make Indian defence quantum secure from adversaries, there is a need for a bigger and urgent step by the government to embrace the technology for all its critical infrastructure 

The lowest layer offers “New Root of Trust” from Quantum Random number generator which offers very high entropy at a very high throughput.  This layer feed into Quantum Key Distribution platform, QKD to generate a pair of quantum secure symmetric keys between two nodes of a network.  The generated keys can be securely stored in the Key Vault which offers key storage and retrieval services as well as the encryption services.

The QRNG layer also feeds into the top PQC layer, which provides the last mile quantum resistant key delivery over any communication medium.  QRNG seed is used by PQC algorithms to generate a pair of robust random keys for quantum resistant encryption.

QNu Labs vision of the future quantum secure networks and critical infrastructure is shown below and is based on the following 5 tenets:

  1. Optical source based QRNG appliance to generate high quality random numbers as the new ‘Root of Trust’.
  2. Cloud based QRNG solution to generate digital certificates, web tokens, APIs and other crypto material needed by different infrastructure and applications.
  3. Use chip based QRNG solutions in the end devices (Mobile phones, IoT devices etc.) to generate local onboard entropy for encryption.
  4. Connect edge devices to the network through PQC based solutions such as Quantum secure VPN available for Android, Linux, Windows and other common platforms.
  5. Intracity secure communication being achieved using QKD devices which are extended using Trusted Relay Nodes or QVPN solution for WAN connectivity.

On the occasion of 75th Independence Day, under the iDEX program, Indian Army has issued the RFP to QNu Labs to procure a set of QKD nodes to test and deploy the quantum technology over 400Kms of the communication network. While this is a great first step to make Indian defence quantum secure from powerful adversaries, there is an urgent need for bigger steps by the government to embrace this technology, for all its critical infrastructure.

On this momentous occasion, QNu Labs commits to make India Safe and Secure through its technology.

-The writer is Co-Founder and CEO of QNu Labs, pioneers of Quantum Tech in India and winner of ‘National Technology Award 2022’ and ‘iDEX Open Challenge 2