Introducing Quantum Origin
A quantum-enhanced cryptographic key generation platform to protect data from advancing threats
- Quantum Origin is the world’s first commercial product built using quantum computers that delivers an outcome that classical computers could not achieve
- Quantum Origin is the first platform to derive cryptographic keys using the output of a quantum computer to ensure data is protected at foundational level against evolving attacks
- It provides immediate protection to enterprises and governments from current security issues, arising from the use of weaker random number generators (RNGs)
- Quantum Origin also helps protect against ‘hack now, decrypt later’ attacks, which are already happening and will have future implications
- The quantum-enhanced cryptographic keys generated by Quantum Origin are based on verifiable quantum randomness and can be integrated into existing systems. The protocol relies on “entanglement”, a unique feature of quantum mechanics.
- Quantum Origin supports traditional algorithms, such as RSA or AES, as well as post-quantum cryptography algorithms currently being standardized by the National Institute for Standards and Technology (NIST)
Cambridge Quantum (CQ), the global leader in quantum software, and a wholly owned subsidiary of Quantinuum, the world’s leading integrated quantum computing company, is pleased to announce that it is launching Quantum Origin – the world’s first commercially available cryptographic key generation platform based on verifiable quantum randomness. It is the first commercial product built using a noisy, intermediate-scale quantum (NISQ) computer and has been built to secure the world’s data from both current and advancing threats to current encryption.
Randomness is critical to securing current security solutions as well as protecting systems from the future threat of quantum attacks. These attacks will further weaken deterministic methods of random number generation, as well as methods that are not verifiably random and from a quantum source.
Today’s systems are protected by encryption standards such as RSA and AES. Their resilience is based on the inability to “break” a long string from a random number generator (RNG). Today’s RNGs, however, lack true, verifiable randomness; the numbers being generated aren’t as unpredictable as thought, and, as a result, such RNGs have been the point of failure in a growing number of cyber attacks. To add to this, the potential threat of quantum attacks is now raising the stakes further, incentivizing criminals to steal encrypted data passing over the internet, with a view to decrypting it later using quantum computers. So-called “hack now, decrypt later” attacks.
Quantum Origin is a cloud-hosted platform that protects against these current and future threats. It uses the unpredictable nature of quantum mechanics to generate cryptographic keys seeded with verifiable quantum randomness from Quantinuum’s H-Series quantum computers, Powered by Honeywell. It supports traditional algorithms, such as RSA or AES, as well as post-quantum cryptography algorithms currently being standardized by the National Institute for Standards and Technology (NIST).
“We have been working for a number of years now on a method to efficiently and effectively use the unique features of quantum computers in order to provide our customers with a defense against adversaries and criminals now and in the future once quantum computers are prevalent,” said Ilyas Khan, CEO of Quantinuum and Founder of Cambridge Quantum. He added “Quantum Origin gives us the ability to be safe from the most sophisticated and powerful threats today as well threats from quantum computers in the future.”
Duncan Jones, head of cybersecurity at Cambridge Quantum, said: “When we talk about protecting systems using quantum-powered technologies, we’re not just talking about protecting them from future threats. From large-scale takedowns of organizations, to nation state hackers and the worrying potential of ‘hack now, decrypt later’ attacks, the threats are very real today, and very much here to stay. Responsible enterprises need to deploy every defense possible to ensure maximum protection at the encryption level today and tomorrow.”
Quantum-enhanced keys on demand
With Quantum Origin, when an organization requires quantum-enhanced keys to be generated, it can now make a call via an API. Quantum Origin generates the keys before encrypting them with a transport key and securely relaying them back to the organization. To give organizations a high-level of assurance that their encryption keys are as unpredictable as possible, Quantum Origin tests the entire output from the quantum computers, ensuring that each key is seeded from verifiable quantum randomness.
These keys are then simple and easy to integrate within customers' existing systems because they’re provided in a format that can be consumed by traditional cybersecurity systems and hardware. This end-to-end approach ensures key generation is on-demand and is capable of scaling with use, all while remaining secure.
Quantum Origin in practice
Quantum Origin keys should be used in any scenario where there is a need for strong cybersecurity. At launch, Cambridge Quantum will offer Quantum Origin to financial services companies and vendors of cybersecurity products before expanding into other high priority sectors, such as telecommunications, energy, manufacturing, defense and government.
The technology has already been used in a series of projects with launch partners. Axiom Space used Quantum Origin to conduct a test of post-quantum encrypted communication between the ISS and Earth — sending the message “Hello Quantum World” back to earth encrypted with post-quantum keys seeded from verifiable quantum randomness. Fujitsu integrated Quantum Origin into its software-defined wide area network (SDWAN) using quantum-enhanced keys alongside traditional algorithms.
For more information:
— Learn more about Quantum Origin
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— Explore our case studies
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About Quantinuum
Quantinuum, the world’s largest integrated quantum company, pioneers powerful quantum computers and advanced software solutions. Quantinuum’s technology drives breakthroughs in materials discovery, cybersecurity, and next-gen quantum AI. With over 500 employees, including 370+ scientists and engineers, Quantinuum leads the quantum computing revolution across continents.
For a novel technology to be successful, it must prove that it is both useful and works as described.
Checking that our computers “work as described” is called benchmarking and verification by the experts. We are proud to be leaders in this field, with the most benchmarked quantum processors in the world. We also work with National Laboratories in various countries to develop new benchmarking techniques and standards. Additionally, we have our own team of experts leading the field in benchmarking and verification.
Currently, a lot of verification (i.e. checking that you got the right answer) is done by classical computers – most quantum processors can still be simulated by a classical computer. As we move towards quantum processors that are hard (or impossible) to simulate, this introduces a problem: how can we keep checking that our technology is working correctly without simulating it?
We recently partnered with the UK’s Quantum Software Lab to develop a novel and scalable verification and benchmarking protocol that will help us as we make the transition to quantum processors that cannot be simulated.
This new protocol does not require classical simulation, or the transfer of a qubit between two parties. The team’s “on-chip” verification protocol eliminates the need for a physically separated verifier and makes no assumptions about the processor’s noise. To top it all off, this new protocol is qubit-efficient.
The team’s protocol is application-agnostic, benefiting all users. Further, the protocol is optimized to our QCCD hardware, meaning that we have a path towards verified quantum advantage – as we compute more things that cannot be classically simulated, we will be able to check that what we are doing is right.
Running the protocol on Quantinuum System Model H1, the team ended up performing the largest verified Measurement Based Quantum Computing (MBQC) circuit to date. This was enabled by our System Model H1’s low cross-talk gate zones, mid-circuit measurement and reset, and long coherence times. By performing the largest verified MBQC computation to date, and by verifying computations significantly larger than any others to be verified before, we reaffirm the Quantinuum Systems as best-in-class.
Particle accelerators like the LHC take serious computing power. Often on the bleeding-edge of computing technology, accelerator projects sometimes even drive innovations in computing. In fact, while there is some controversy over exactly where the world wide web was created, it is often attributed to Tim Berners-Lee at CERN, who developed it to meet the demand for automated information-sharing between scientists in universities and institutes around the world.
With annual data generated by accelerators in excess of exabytes (a billion gigabytes), tens of millions of lines of code written to support the experiments, and incredibly demanding hardware requirements, it’s no surprise that the High Energy Physics community is interested in quantum computing, which offers real solutions to some of their hardest problems. Furthermore, the HEP community is well-positioned to support the early stages of technological development: with budgets in the 10s of billions per year and tens of thousands of scientists and engineers working on accelerator and computational physics, this is a ripe industry for quantum computing to tap.
As the authors of this paper stated: “[Quantum Computing] encompasses several defining characteristics that are of particular interest to experimental HEP: the potential for quantum speed-up in processing time, sensitivity to sources of correlations in data, and increased expressivity of quantum systems... Experiments running on high-luminosity accelerators need faster algorithms; identification and reconstruction algorithms need to capture correlations in signals; simulation and inference tools need to express and calculate functions that are classically intractable”
The authors go on to state: “Within the existing data reconstruction and analysis paradigm, access to algorithms that exhibit quantum speed-ups would revolutionize the simulation of large-scale quantum systems and the processing of data from complex experimental set-ups. This would enable a new generation of precision measurements to probe deeper into the nature of the universe. Existing measurements may contain the signatures of underlying quantum correlations or other sources of new physics that are inaccessible to classical analysis techniques. Quantum algorithms that leverage these properties could potentially extract more information from a given dataset than classical algorithms.”
Our scientists have been working with a team at DESY, one of the world’s leading accelerator centers, to bring the power of quantum computing to particle physics. DESY, short for Deutsches Elektronen-Synchrotron, is a national research center for fundamental science located in Hamburg and Zeuthen, where the Center for Quantum Technologies and Applications (CQTA) is based. DESY operates, develops, and constructs particle accelerators used to investigate the structure, dynamics and function of matter, and conducts a broad spectrum of interdisciplinary scientific research. DESY employs about 3,000 staff members from more than 60 nations, and is part of the worldwide computer network to store and analyze the enormous flood of data that is produced by the LHC in Geneva.
In a recent paper, our scientists collaborated with scientists from DESY, the Leiden Institute of Advanced Computer Science (LIACS), and Northeastern University to explore using a generative quantum machine learning model, called a “quantum Boltzmann machine” to untangle data from CERN’s LHC.
The goal was to learn probability distributions relevant to high energy physics better than the corresponding classical models. The data specifically contains “particle jet events”, which describe how colliders collect data about the subatomic particles generated during the experiments.
In some cases the quantum Boltzmann machine was indeed better, compared to a classical Boltzmann machine. The team is analyzed when and why this happens, understanding better how to apply these new quantum tools in this research setting. The team also studied the effect of the data encoding into a quantum state, noting that it can have a decisive effect on the training performance. Especially enticing is that the quantum Boltzmann machine is efficiently trainable, which our scientists showed in a recent paper published in Nature Communications Physics.
Find the Quantinuum team at this year’s SC24 conference from November 17th – 22nd in Atlanta, Georgia. Meet our team at Booth #4351 to discover how Quantinuum is bridging the gap between quantum computing and high-performance compute with leading industry partners.
The Quantinuum team will be participating in the below panel and poster sessions to showcase our quantum computing technologies.
Monday, Nov 18, 8:00 - 8:25pm, EST
Panel: KAUST booth 1031
Nash Palaniswamy, Quantinuum’s CCO, will join a panel discussion with quantum vendors and KAUST partners to discuss advancements in quantum technology.
Wednesday, Nov 20, 3:30 – 5:00pm, EST
Panel: Educating for a Hybrid Future: Bridging the Gap between High-Performance and Quantum Computing
Vincent Anandraj, Quantinuum’s Director of Global Ecosystem and Strategic Alliances, will moderate this panel which brings together experts from leading supercomputing centers and the quantum computing industry, including PSC, Leibniz Supercomputing Centre, IQM Quantum Computers, NVIDIA, and National Research Foundation.
Thursday, Nov 21, 11:00 – 11:30am, EST
Presentation: Realizing Quantum Kernel Models at Scale with Matrix Product State Simulation
Pablo Andres-Martinez, Research Scientist at Quantinuum, will present research done in collaboration with HSBC, where the team applied quantum methods to fraud detection.