“Meet and Greet” with the PQ-REACT Open Call#1-Develop beneficiaries.

Five organisations across Europe are the beneficiaries of the PQ-REACT Open Call#1-DEVELOP. Over the next six months, we will collaborate closely with them to bring their innovative ideas to life and materialise their proposals.

Let’s have a “Quantum coffee sip” with Tecnalia.

Technalia Research & Innovation is the leading private Technology Center in Spain and one of the main organizations dedicated to applied research in Europe.

Their project title is “QUIET – QRISP for MeasUring the SecurIty of LatticE-Based CrypTosystems”, having chosen Use Case 4 (Eclipse-Qrisp for PQC).

First, congratulations on your win! Can you tell us about your organisation and your journey into quantum science?

Tecnalia started to work into quantum some years ago initially working on cryptography. In 2022, the organization decided to make a big bet into quantum and created the Quantum Technologies team with people from different background.

Quantum Technologies provide the means to solve key problems of the Digital Transformation, such as those related to Artificial Intelligence, ultra-secure communications or ultra-high sensitivity sensing. Although they are new, they offer the promise of significantly surpassing their traditional counterparts in terms of impact.

We seek to harness the potential of these technologies. We have expert teams in these disciplines, such as quantum computing, simulation, cybersecurity, communications and sensing, for successful use in business process problems and needs.

We work closely with other specialised Tecnalia and external teams as a way to accelerate the hybridisation of knowledge in technologies-needs and to articulate cooperation mechanisms to promote quantum applications with an impact on industry.

Our Key Quantum Technologies:

• Optimisation: Existing quantum hardware enables certain optimisation problems to be addressed with a computational advantage over traditional systems.

• Quantum Machine Learning: applications for prediction, clustering, reinforced and deep learning.

• Simulation: simulation of systems governed by the laws of quantum mechanics and numerical systems.

• Communications protection: Quantum Key Distribution (QKD) systems.

• Advanced Cryptography: secure cryptographic mechanisms against quantum computing.

• Quantum sensing: exploitation of quantum effects to substantially increase detection and measurement sensitivity.

What motivated you to participate in the PQ-REACT Open Call#1?

As the Quantum Technologies team was created with people of different background, different topics from PQ-REACT were interesting for Tecnalia and, finally, two main groups were interested.

Two scopes of action from Tecnalia are “Energy Transition” and “Digital Transformation”.

Regarding the Energy Transition, we develop solutions for a competitive generation of renewable energy and for CO2-free mobility. Our experience in smart networks, energy storage (including hydrogen), digital technologies, energy efficiency, and advanced materials supports their own deployment. We put the smart in systems and processes related to power generation, distribution, and supply. Thus, driving new digital solution such as cybersecurity.

The focus of Digital Transformation is the digitalisation of the company’s value proposal, redesigning processes and, above all, their business models. It also implies thinking about the product or service in terms of the user, the digital perimeter we build, while seeking user loyalty in every interaction. This is a transformation that involves new models of power and a change that requires the evolution of the culture of organizations and people.

We innovate in the generation of security technologies and trust in digital systems, the weak point of digital transformation when it does not contemplate the “security by design” principles nor does it comply with protective measures in depth:

• Development of proof of concept and solutions based on privacy or traceability technologies.

• Tools and methods to ensure safety & security from the early stages of design.

• Technologies for controlling and safeguarding the security of systems, data, and networks.

• Management of security risks in critical systems.

With this, we offer new applications in areas such as Quantum Security / Post-Quantum Cryptography.

Can you tell us a few words about your project? The initial idea behind the proposal, its future impact and application?

The proposed project aims to study the effects that the different parameters defining a lattice may cause in the security of cryptographic schemes based on them. Considering the state-of-the-art attacks to those schemes, the goal is to build a tool using QRISP that, given some lattice parameters, outlines the security of the underlying schemes.

These are the main objectives of the proposed project:

– Analysis of the state of the art on PQC standards and attacks over lattice problems.

– Study of the different parameters that define a lattice, and how they affect to the security of the derived lattice problems used in PQC.

– Selection of one of the attacks and implementation on QRISP. The attack should receive as input the lattice (or its defining parameters).

– Study of how the choice of parameters affects the success of the attack.

The results of this project can help to identify the security level of different configurations for lattice-based cryptographic schemes.

What do you believe is the most exciting and important aspect of quantum technologies from your point of view? And how this will impact society?

Probably quantum computers will impact most into what we know nowadays as cybersecurity. Quantum algorithms such as Shor or Grover will make the most common secure primitives obsolete. With this in mind, from Tecnalia we are working on secure migration strategies, ensuring quantum safe environments for our data and communications.

We believe quantum computing will be a key factor for new innovations, but we should not forget the risk of these technologies.

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