PQ News

We greatly enjoyed a busy and successful few days at MWC Barcelona last month. PQShield had a presence in the Great Britain & Northern Ireland Pavilion, Pod 7A15 (Hall 7) and on our partner booths, AMD and Lattice Semiconductor. Here is a round-up of our week!

AMD Booth

At MWC 2024 Barcelona, PQShield and AMD collaborated to demonstrate High Performance Quantum Safe Cryptography.  Post Quantum Cryptography (PQC) or Quantum Safe Cryptography is designed to run on current generation computing hardware, however like classical cryptography the algorithms benefit from hardware acceleration. PQShield’s PQPerform PQC hardware accelerator was installed on the programmable logic of the AMD Versal Adaptive SoC.

The AMD Versal is a powerful network compute platform combining programmable logic with Adaptable Intelligent Engines, DSP, Real-Time CPUs, Application CPUs, and high-speed networking. The demonstration compared a software implementation versus the PQPerform hardware accelerated implementation of FIPS203 (ML-KEM) and FIPS204 (ML-DSA).   Benchmarks running on the Versal ARM Cortex A72 Linux operating system showed that PQPerform can accelerate the PQC algorithms by a factor of 10 whilst significantly reducing the CPU load.

Lattice Semiconductor Booth

PQShield joined forces with Lattice to deliver a demonstration of quantum-resistant algorithms deployed on Lattice’s Certus Pro-NX products. The demonstration ran and logged all operations of FIPS203 (ML-KEM) and FIPS204 (ML-DSA).

The demonstration highlighted how PQC can protect critical networking infrastructures from attacks powered by quantum computers, and how a system-on-a-chip can be aligned to meet imminent, new cybersecurity standards.

The quantum threat is of course, not just a future problem. Attackers can already harvest encrypted sensitive information and store it until a quantum technique becomes sophisticated enough to access the data. The need for quantum resilience as a solid line of defense is high, and it matters in every single industry. That’s why the push towards international standards has been accelerating, with finalization of the standards from NIST expected in just a few months’ time. PQShield, the world’s largest commercial assembly of post-quantum cryptographers, has actively contributed to the algorithms used in these new PQC standards, and we advise organizations throughout the UK, US, Japan, and Europe on the transition to quantum resistance.

With this latest demonstration, PQShield displayed the next generation of security on Lattice FPGAs, integrating our PQPlatform hardware with Lattice’s Certus Pro-NX. PQPlatform is designed specifically for small footprint, and this demo highlighted how we can provide a powerful, quantum-resistant defense for the networking hardware used in critical national infrastructure.

We are already booked and excited for MWC 2025, we hope to see you there too!