Oliver Maurhart

The transition of Quantum Technologies (QT) being no longer pure basic research but touching applied fields with emerging products is companied by requests for standardization and certification. The call of the markets requesting products based on QT will require alignment of QT products to match not only the need for standards but also the proof to fulfil certification procedures. We will isolate and identify the most promising candidates for this endeavour and by listing challenges, obstacles and dependencies we will propose a strategy and envision a standardization roadmap

Since 2004 AIT has developed a software suite for QKD post processing and key routing in trusted repeater networks. This software provides a set of building blocks to integrate sifting, error estimation, error correction, confirmation, privacy amplification and information-theoretically secure message authentication. Accompanying the QKD post-processing is the Quantum Point-to-Point Protocol (Q3P) node which enforces information-theoretically secure network peer-to-peer communication for classical applications. We already reported on the support for different DV and CV-QKD protocols, and high-performance error correction using GPUs for terrestrial QKD. Here we will discuss the following new capabilities of the software * a low dependency footprint for future use on satellites, * hibernation of QKD post-processing pipelines and switching between them for key establishment with different ground terminals and satellites, * CoAP interfaces to cover demands of the control and management plane in today’s network environment, and * the port to ARM/FPGA SoC boards. The CoAP interfaces allow rapid scripting of QKD modules or AIT QKD based applications with Python or even Bash. Utilities and tools, as well as a boilerplate setup for QKD module coding projects, also support the creation of new QKD post-processing modules or QKD based user applications. The AIT QKD software is bundled with management tools, partly GUI oriented. The software is available under different license options and AIT welcomes suggestions from academic groups or industry to co-operate.

We present R10, a novel release of the QKD open source software by AIT. We discuss in detail the main modification in architecture, the introduction of autonomous QKD modules that can communicate directly and no longer need a centralized supervision of a QKD node. This approach allows to get rid of performance and throughput bottlenecks and greatly simplify protocol design and implementation. We further discuss novel algorithms in R10, related to authentication as well as reconciliation and error estimation during post processing. We also present a novel QKD IPSEC integration, enabled by R10.