QNu Labs & India Will Be The Go-To Place For Quantum Cybersecurity

We dwell in a digital world that’s closely dependent on the web, and but, a lot of our cybersecurity strategies are fairly juvenile. QNu Labs, pronounced as Q-New, is India’s solely quantum-tech cybersecurity firm, and it’s making an attempt to steer the quantum mission for India. Sunil Gupta, Co-founder & CEO of QNu Labs, explains the necessity to reimagine cybersecurity in an interview with EFY.

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Q. Why do you are feeling there’s a have to reimagine cybersecurity?

A. Let me take you again to 2016. About five-and-a-half years in the past, there have been a number of issues taking place in India and in addition globally. In 2016, demonetisation occurred and India determined to go digital—from a money primarily based financial system to a cashless financial system. PhonePe, UPI, and many others got here up. All people within the nation has began doing issues utilizing digital platforms. India is turning into a very digital financial system, apart from a couple of money primarily based actions. Healthcare, social safety, and banking, all occur digitally.

To begin with, at this time’s encryption relies upon a posh mathematical downside that may’t be damaged by present classical computer systems and supercomputers however hackers will be capable of break the encryption utilizing scalable quantum computer systems. The second factor is that encryption keys at this time are generated every so often. They need to be generated extra regularly and ought to be random. You’ll be stunned to seek out out that giant enterprises sometimes have about 85,000 keys. Most of those keys don’t change for 2 to 3 years! Now think about if a key’s stolen by someone and the individual decrypts the information and steals it.

Every time a breach occurs, individuals are fearful about information loss, however they have no idea that additionally they lose the encryption keys. When folks hack right into a server, they not solely take away the information but in addition the encryption keys—in order that they will steal information sooner or later as properly.

We lock the doorways of our homes utilizing keys. We really feel that the bottom line is with us and with our household and no person else has it. Simply think about if anybody has duplicated your key bodily. It’s the identical premise right here. The thought is, keys ought to be modified regularly. There ought to be no correlation between your previous keys and your future keys, and these ought to be generated in actual time. Lastly, if enterprises are going to retailer round 85,000 keys, how are they going to be managed? There ought to be a correct key administration system.

Q. Might you elaborate on among the frequent functions or companies that we use which are truly a safety risk?

A. In lots of chat functions, your messages are saved within the firm’s server. That’s the way you’re capable of obtain your messages once more if you purchase a brand new telephone. However so long as messages are on the server, it turns into a safety problem.

One other one is VPN (digital non-public community). When folks work remotely, they use VPNs. However lots of these VPNs are extremely safe and have backdoors which are designed to steal confidential information. If you’re utilizing a Chinese language VPN to attach from your property to your workplace, the site visitors can be routed to Chinese language servers—that’s an enormous safety threat.

The information on our telephones and laptops can also be a very good instance. Lots of people preserve their private information on their laptops unencrypted. If somebody hacks it, it’s gone! QNu Labs gives companies to fight all three of those points utilizing quantum expertise.

Q. What’s hardware-based random quantity era and the way is it completely different from the software program counterpart?

A. Random quantity mills have to be actually random, proper? Software program primarily based random quantity mills depend upon inputs. Should you change the enter, the output may even change. These pseudo-random numbers are very predictable as a result of software program tends to repeat numbers and there are observable patterns. Utilizing these patterns, hackers can work out what the subsequent random quantity can be. They’re good by way of their throughput, however they’re not good by way of their randomness.

However, {hardware} random quantity mills are good by way of their randomness, however not good by way of their entropy; you want a really excessive entropy. In our resolution Tropos (quantum random quantity generator), what now we have achieved is, we used the quantum phenomenon.

All of the pure phenomena like wind, mild, and sound are vector portions; they’ve each particle and wave properties. We use a lightweight supply, a laser, that generates a lightweight beam. That mild beam creates photons. As a result of photons have a wave nature in addition to particulate nature, we put them right into a quantum state (superposition state). When this occurs, they turn into inherently random. Even when we generate billions of random numbers, every can be completely different because of the character of sunshine. As a result of there isn’t a human intervention, and every part is pure, we’re in a position to try this at excessive entropy and really excessive throughput.

Q. Why has QNu Labs chosen India for his or her Quantum Mission?

A. India is a digital financial system with so many individuals utilizing digital options. Indian philosophy and scriptures have been speaking about quantum, and it’s the foundation of the Indian Vedanta system. That is the rationale why—though now we have companions all internationally—we consider that India is the proper place to construct quantum cryptography expertise and deploy it.

We’re very proud that now we have put India on the quantum map of the world. We’re in all probability the second or third largest on the earth doing this. We’re making an attempt to place India in a core place for this expertise. Our entire thought is that everyone on the earth would come to us for one of these resolution.

We’re making an attempt to steer the quantum mission for India. Individuals typically discuss this solely in academia and analysis. However for folks to profit from this, you must construct services. We’re making quantum cybersecurity a actuality and bringing it into the mainstream.

In all Sci-Fi motion pictures, everyone seems to be fearful about machines defeating people. The protagonist has to return in time and alter one thing to save lots of the world. That’s our premise—we’re serving to enterprises undertake quantum tech at this time in order that sooner or later, quantum computer systems and robots outfitted with quantum computing can’t defeat people.

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