Most of the enterprises rely on encryption and public key cryptography to safeguard sensitive information. But quantum computing — relies on the superposition state of bits called qubits which enables it to solve certain problems in exponentially shorter time— stands obsolete to the current encryption methods. Therefore, it is time to rethink encryption methods that can withstand the capabilities of quantum computing.

A Bangalore-based start-up, QNu Labs Pvt Ltd is offering advanced products and solutions towards safeguarding your data in a futuristic manner. The company offers quantum cryptography based next generation security solutions, which allows customers to upgrade their legacy crypto infrastructure to quantum safe cryptography. CIO Insider holds an insightful conversation with the company’s Co-Founder and CEO.

In conversation with Sunil Gupta, Co-Founder and CEO, QNu Labs

Over the years, the cyber security market has only grown up and it has also been impressive the way the industry has responded. Where is QNu positioned in the current industry?
QNu Labs is the first company in India to offer quantum-safe cryptography products and solutions to the cybersecurity market. We highly focus on sup- plying next-gen based security of data on the inter- net and on the cloud. Since quantum computers are known for their ability to solve certain problems in quadratic time, it is very simple for these machines to figure out the currently available encryption keys. So our major role in this cybersecurity

market is to bring quantum cryptography, which cannot be broken even by the upcoming scalable quantum computers. We call this next-generation encryption method as the post quantum cryptography, which will be able to withstand the onslaught of quantum computers.

Give an account of the challenges you encountered while building Quantum cryptography technology products and how did COVID-19 affect your operations?
Cybersecurity has always been a cat and mouse chase. The quantum cryptography has to be brought in operations prior to the arrival of quantum computers. This means that someone had to take the call and rapidly build the technology, since people often take time to adapt to a new tech. It was a challenging time in the last two years in building our quantum cryptography-based products. We started with our first customer from the Middle East and a couple of customers in India and then COVID happened, which made reaching customers challenging.

photons which hit a half glazed mirror and some of them reflect while others pass through it and this is a perfect random phenomenon and this is the idea behind ‘Tropos’.

Tropos is the measurement of randomness, which is the first product that generates perfectly random numbers for the encryption key. Sharing of the encryption key with all the stakeholders without any chance of leakage is another hassle, which is where our second product Armos comes in. Armos ideally conducts key distribution at both ends at the same time without anyone knowing it and has the ability to change keys more than 100 times in a second. Our third product is called Qosmos that provides the highest quality randomness and a secure method of providing the seed for entropy starved systems or applications. It’s a cloud hosted model where the product can be hosted on any public and private cloud.

Share with us your most unforgettable moments of success.
We are proud to have achieved our vision of a deep tech company producing state of the art fully indigenized quantum safe security products which can be deployed globally and this alone is a huge achievement and honor for us. Another feat was when we successfully field trialed and deployed the first Quantum Key Distribution Product, as we received a lot of pessimistic inputs about building deep tech products in India and about using our money in this impossible venture. But our belief, concept and vision of a ‘New India’ is what made us relentlessly continue our efforts towards the mission and we were able to make India’s first quantum security product in Bangalore.

Where is the company headed in the years to come? What’s QNu’s future roadmap?
Our mission is to accelerate the world’s transition to quantum based cryptography. We want to make sure that more and more enterprises adopt quantum cryptography to get ahead in their game before quantum computers arrive. Our vision is that in the next two years, we become a known global company from India in the quantum cryptography space.