From Spain to Estonia, four multidisciplinary teams are kicking off cutting-edge projects to accelerate Europe’s transition to the post-quantum cryptography era. The winning consortia this time are bringing together expertise and innovation from across the EU, including contributors from Spain, Malta, Bulgaria, Denmark, Italy, and Estonia.
Q-SAFE evaluates and deploys quantum-resistant digital-signature schemes to secure crypto-agile firmware updates for diverse smart-meter and IoT fleets. Using Datakorum’s PIPE20HUB— a multiprotocol gateway controlling up to 32 electricity, water or gas legacy meters via DLMS, M-Bus and Modbus— the project delivers authenticated OTA upgrades over NB-IoT/LTE-M. The hub verifies signatures on-device with PQC primitives such as CRYSTALS-Dilithium, Falcon and hybrid modes, managed by a key-ring agility layer for seamless algorithm rotation. Benchmarking signature size, compute time and memory in constrained networks, Q-SAFE creates a scalable, future-proof update framework for critical metering infrastructures.
The QUSENA-6G project focuses on integrating quantum-safe technologies (QKD and PQC) into 5GB/6G networks to secure both backbone control traffic and end-user data.
QKD will protect critical 5G core links with high-throughput key delivery and automatic failover in case of fiber outages. PQC will secure communication at the 5G edge, including user equipment and MEC applications. This modular and transparent integration will enable fast, scalable deployment of quantum-safe 5GB networks, ensuring end-to-end security against emerging quantum threats. The solution will be based on real, mature technologies developed by the project partners, enabling immediate validation and future commercial adaptation.
QUAS is a practical framework to secure modern communication protocols such as QUIC and SIP with post quantum cryptography by replacing classical key exchanges and digital signatures with NIST recommended schemes like HQC, Kyber and Dilithium, embedding them in transport and authentication flows to protect web, VoIP and API traffic while enabling hybrid migration paths, publishing open source results and benchmarks to guide early adoption.
The Consortium
Qryptix is a plugin for the Eclipse-Qrisp IDE that helps developers, researchers, and compliance officers transition from classical to post-quantum cryptography (PQC). It automatically detects insecure code, recommends PQC replacements, supports hybrid cryptography, benchmarks performance, simulates quantum threats, and generates compliance reports. Qryptix makes quantum-safe cryptography adoption practical, efficient, and compliant.
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