A deep-tech startup that develops cryptographic technologies to protect equipment, applications and communications networks for the future where quantum computers can make many existing Cybersecurity methods worthless is emerging today from a stealth phase with $7 million in financing and a goal to make cryptographic security something that cannot be cracked by constructing, even with the most advanced systems. PQShield was created in 2018 and hasn’t been in vain for its tenure of secrecy.
The company appears to have the greatest number of UK cryptography PhDs outside academics and government departments and is one of the main donors to the NIST Cybersecurity project (along with research universities and big tech companies) seeking to develop new cryptographic requirements, taking into account the fact that quantum computation is likely to function rapidly.
“The size is huge,” said of that project Dr. Ali El Kaafarani, a research fellow at Oxford’s Mathematical Institute and former engineer at Hewlett-Packard Laboratories who is PQShield’s founder and CEO.
And according to El Kaafarani, the startup has customers — enterprises that build hardware and software services or run communications systems that deal with sensitive information and run the greatest risk of hacking.
They include entities that it does not name in the financial and government sectors, as well as its first OEM client, Bosch. El Kaafarani said in an interview that it is also in talks with at least one big communications and messaging service seeking additional protection on messaging networks for end-to-end encryption. Other target applications might include keyless vehicles, IoT devices that are linked, and cloud services.
The business void that PQShield seeks to tackle is that whilst a range of businesses are currently testing the bleeding edge of cryptographic technology on the market — including major tech firms such as Amazon and Microsoft, Hub Technology, Duality, another UK company based on post-quantum cryptography called Post Quantum, and a range of others.
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El Kaafarani claims that PQShield is the first company to tackle this predicament with a multi-pronged solution that addresses a range of applications, including technologies that accept existing cryptographic requirements and have a migration route for the next generation to how they should look — meaning that they can be commercially implemented today, even without quantum computers being a commercial reality.
A Device on Chip (SoC) implementation is designed for hardware applications and must be licensed to hardware manufacturers (Bosch is the first OEM). There is an SDK for software applications that secures messaging and is secured by “post-quantum algorithms” based on a secure protocol derived from Signal. Thinking about and planning across the full continuum of technologies is fundamental to the approach taken by PQShield, he said.
Conclusion:
The coronavirus and its effects have particularly adversely affected some industries in the tech field, a situation compounded by uncertainty regarding the future of the global economy.
