Quantum Key Industrial SystemS

ongoing

The project ‘Quantum Key Industrial SystemS’ (QKISS) brings together two high-tech industrial groups and two leading academic experts from France, with the goal to produce a complete, high-performing, secure and certifiable European Quantum Key Distribution (QKD) system exceeding TRL8. The project outcome will thus reinforce the QKD industrial ecosystem and the EU strategic digital autonomy, by giving birth to a new QKD hardware supplier that the EU is currently lacking. QKISS includes the manufacturing of opto-electronic components, the development of specialized signal processing and coding algorithms, the full system integration and the field demonstrations. The security analysis and the design strategy include certifiability and compliance with EU standards at an early stage, by taking into account limitation of attack surface, in-depth defence and common criteria evaluations for the protection profile. For this purpose the design features a low number of external interfaces, a limited number of components for realistic system construction, an industrial architecture for legacy networks and use of QKD as an add-on to IT needs. The strong partnership involves a limited number of actors for better efficiency. In addition, QKISS will also produce field evidence of compatibility with telecom network systems, with the QKD systems functioning together with Mistral encryptors from Thales, adapted to the specific QKD framework. QKISS builds on the latest developments in continuous-variable QKD (CVQKD) and on the synergies initiated by recent EU-funded projects. It targets a low-cost and high-rate implementation suitable for metro use-cases with hundreds of megabaud modulation rates and megabits per second secure key rates. After an industrialisation phase, QKISS systems will be available for deployment in the EuroQCI and applications relying on private communications: e.g. e-banking, e-health, government communication or the management of critical infrastructure.