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Founded in 2016, QNu Labs was incubated in IIT Madras, at the behest of Dr. Vijaya Raghavan, PSA to the Prime Minister. The company operates in the Quantum Cybersecurity domain and has clients in India and the Middle East. Analytics Insight has engaged in an exclusive interview with Sunil Gupta, CEO, and Co-founder, QNu Labs.
Founded in 2016, QNu Labs was incubated in IIT Madras, at the behest of Dr. Vijaya Raghavan, PSA to the Prime Minister. The company operates in the Quantum Cybersecurity domain and has clients in India and the Middle East. QNu Labs is India's first and the only company that offers commercially ready Quantum Cyber-Security Products with data encryption solutions that are designed to provide protection against the attacks on rapidly becoming obsolete public key cryptography and cyber-attacks from quantum computers.
A "Make in India" initiative, QNu Labs offers a fully indigenized 'Quantum dome' leveraging its two fully indigenized products – Quantum Random Number Generator (Tropos) and Quantum Key Distribution (Armos). The Company has built powerful solutions leveraging unbreakable laws of quantum physics for preventing data thefts caused by man-in-the-middle attacks (phishing, malware, etc.) today and empowers organizations to become future-ready against more advanced attacks from advanced quantum computers.
QNu Labs quantum-safe data security solutions are designed to seamlessly plug in with the existing installed infrastructures in organizations and hence, are commercially most viable. The company's technology and products have been extensively validated and are being used by the Indian army and navy; and are now available at the GeM portal, too.
Mentioned below are some of the projects that have been successfully undertaken by QNu Labs:
QNu Labs current and potential target customers include:
Over the last five years, QNu Labs has built an ecosystem consisting of academia partners, technology partners, professional services partners, vendors, and suppliers to develop fully indigenized products from concept to manufacturing.
QNu Labs was established with an objective to create a globally recognized deep tech product company from India. It was set up to build a trusted platform with an offering for the hyperconnected digital world of future, which can expose the current fragile security frameworks and security postures of today's enterprises.
QNu Labs mission is to "accelerate the world's transition to quantum secure communications," thus empowering enterprises to detect and prevent man-in-the-middle attacks. With encrypted data being harvested on a large scale by state-sponsored hackers, and the timeline for availability of scalable quantum computers rapidly shrinking day by day, our mission becomes extremely critical.
When QNu Labs released its first product, Quantum Key Distribution (Armos) in 2019, it was our first step to putting India on the Quantum map of the world. Some of our early clients in India and outside procured the technology for their use. This product was also integrated with Cisco ISR series of routers so that applications could use quantum secure robust symmetric keys for encryption. In the subsequent year, QNu Labs released India's first Quantum Random Number Generator (Tropos) which is currently being used by multiple clients for different applications.
Last year, QNu Labs won a project under iDEX (Innovation in Defence Excellence) to develop a QKD technology that will not only stretch single-hop QKD distance to 150-200 kms but will also allow QKD keys to be generated to any distance using the "Trusted Node" approach. The success of this project has not only made India an "Atamnirbhar' nation in quantum cryptography and communication technology but has also shown the prowess of India in QKD technology.
In 2021, QNu Labs released a few Quantum security services and solutions which can be easily used by enterprises through AWS.
With a specialized team of forty-five engineers and scientists, QNu Labs is playing a pivotal role in strengthening India's National Mission on Quantum Technologies & Applications (NM-QTA) to build indigenous capability to make India 'self-reliant' in this game-changing technology.
In the world of Quantum Technology, while some Chinese scientists have announced the possibility of being a step closer to a quantum code-breaking machine, the security concern is that the quantum computers will be able to crack RSA public-key cryptography, which is used to protect data in transit. This will require the security teams to pivot to new post-quantum cryptography solutions. In fact, a conservative estimate from a 2019 DigiCert report said, "teams will need to have protection from quantum computing breaches in place by 2022".
We also foresee two major shifts that highlight the risks that are getting bigger and are bringing classical cryptography to the brink of total collapse. One is the rapidly eroding trust in the digital platforms making people move towards "Zero Trust" architecture and approaches which is an indication that existing technologies and approaches are not working. The second is that trust is getting decentralized with Web3.0 architecture. When we look at the proliferation of solutions based on blockchain technologies, it looks scary from the security point of view.
In a traditional banking system, if a cryptographic key is lost or compromised, its validity can easily be revoked by a central authority and a new key pair can be issued. Revoking the key in a timely manner ensures the continued integrity and confidentiality of the data. On the contrary, in a blockchain system, there is no central authority to manage users' access keys. The owner of a resource is the one holding the private encryption keys. There are no offline backups. If the encryption key is lost, this invariably means that the secured data asset is irrevocably lost.
Quantum cryptography is the solution to address the decentralized trust requirement. We are seeing remarkably interesting applications with fintech and crypto companies that are using blockchain technology as the model. We are also seeing drone companies seriously looking at quantum tech for onboard security and communication security with ground control systems.
In the next 12-18 months, we will see quantum technology getting deployed in 4G/5G, banking, healthcare, pharma, and payment sectors.
Given the complexity of the technology and that it was being attempted for the first time in India, developing technology and product that could deliver a low QBER with reasonable distance and the key rate was a challenge. After a long R&D cycle of 3 years, we developed our first QKD product with competitive specs.
Getting the right users and conducting trials for successful integration and deployment of the products in their existing environment was the next challenge. We had to deploy this cutting-edge technology into the client's existing infrastructure (optical fibre network, encryptors, applications, etc.) without any disturbance to their operations. We achieved this with immense success with our product management approach and early integrations with the right partners.
It was also a bit challenging to raise funds through institutional VCs in India, as most of the VCs did not have any thesis in the quantum technology domain. Additionally, our early clients were mainly in defence, which was not a familiar domain for VCs to invest. A set of angel investors, who believed in the team and the mission, supported us in the early phase of our journey and later, Speciale Invest, who invests only in future technologies and in visionaries who are building deep tech and engineering innovations led the round.
The latest challenge we have been facing is the shortage of electronic and optical components which extended our delivery time by a few weeks. We overcame this by identifying alternate components and building a small inventory of a few components.
QNu Labs offers four products:
While Tropos and Armos are hardware products like appliances, Hodos and Tholos are software products. QNu Labs also offers cloud-based services to clients to reduce their capex spend with ease of upgrade and maintenance. It offers the following services which can be consumed in 'pay as you use' model through APIs
Additionally, QNu also offers packaged applications and solutions for email (QE mail), VPN (QVPN), and messaging (QVerse) security.
QNu Labs has received significant recognition for its efforts and has won the following prestigious awards:
With a range of products and solutions portfolio already commercially ready, we aim to take this technology mainstream. We will spend most of our time implementing the solutions in at least three new different industry verticals. We already have about fifteen projects underway which will get completed in the next 3-6 months. Our solutions will also become available on the marketplace of one of the top cloud players.
On the technology front, our major effort will be towards building a satellite-based QKD product for the country and starting efforts towards 'Integrated Photonics' which will lead to the miniaturization of the technology.
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