On Tuesday, Japanese multinational conglomerate Toshiba announced that it is partnering with Korea’s largest telecommunications company, KT, on a pair of groundbreaking pilot projects in South Korea deploying Quantum Key Distribution (QKD) technology.
QKD is described as a secure cryptographic communications protocol used by two parties to encrypt and decrypt messages. QKD generates a shared “secret key” known only to the sending and receiving parties. QKD is, to date, the only solution theoretically proven to be secure against quantum computing attacks.
Toshiba Group has researched QKD technologies for over two decades, and holds more QKD-related patents than any other entity in the world, having demonstrated QKD technologies and use cases with partners in Japan, the U.S. and Europe.
Complementarily, KT holds the most QKD-network-related international standard approvals in the world, and has promoted the development of Korea’s QKD ecosystem by transferring technologies to small and medium businesses in South Korea. KT has also led the creation of next-generation quantum secure communications services for emerging applications such as drone communications, autonomous vehicles and data centers.
The first project, which has just commenced, will evaluate quality of service (QoS) over a 19 day period on a long-distance hybrid QKD network built with different QKD systems, over a roughly 490km long optical fiber network between Seoul and Busan. This is the longest QKD network yet built and demonstrated in South Korea, and is expected to demonstrate capabilities supporting deployment of QKD services throughout the country. The network is configured with equipment from multiple vendors (Coweaver, WooriNet and Alian), developed with technologies transferred from KT, and using Toshiba/TDSL‘s long distance QKD systems with quantum key management system (KMS).
The evaluation criteria applied to the QKD network QoS were devised by KT and approved as an international standard by the International Telecommunication Union Telecommunication Standardization Sector (ITU-T) last month. This is the first ever application of the standard to QoS evaluation in a hybrid QKD network with QKD systems from multiple vendors.
The second project will be a testbed for an open QKD service (also known as QKD-as-a-Service, or QKDaaS) that can expand the quantum industry ecosystem in South Korea and abroad. This testbed will be operational between Seoul and Daejeon for approximately two years from the summer of 2022, and used by various companies to support the development of next-generation services utilizing quantum technologies. The testbed will be operated as an open platform, and Toshiba Group and KT will use knowledge gained from operation and user feedback to improve QKDaaS.
“Toshiba Group has established industry partnerships in Japan, the U.S., the UK and Singapore to drive the early deployment of quantum secure communication by industrial sectors,” said Shunsuke Okada, Executive Officer, Corporate Senior Vice President and Chief Digital Officer of Toshiba and President and CEO of TDSL “We are excited to collaborate with KT in South Korea, and accelerate the global expansion of our QKD business.”
“This QoS evaluation is significant for verifying the potential of commercial QKD services based on QKD systems from multiple vendors,” said Kim Ye-Han, Executive Vice President and Fusion Technology Institute Director of KT. “KT will continue to invest in R&D not limited to QKD but also to core technologies for realizing the Quantum Internet.”
Last month, Toshiba, along with U.S. financial services giant JPMorgan Chase and telecom equipment maker Ciena announced that they had demonstrated full viability of a first-of-its-kind QKD network for metropolitan areas, resistant to quantum computing attacks and capable of supporting 800 Gbps data rates for mission-critical applications under real-world environmental conditions. This was the first demonstration of QKD securing a mission-critical blockchain application in the industry.
