Future Attacks
In connection with an article I recently published in TQD on university spinouts comes QRate Quantum Communications, a Russian startup founded out of the Russian Quantum Center (RQC) in 2015. A leader in quantum communications, its focus is finding solutions for the telecommunications and banking industries.
Headed by CTO Yury Kurochkin, QRate’s team is building products that will secure cryptography which, more now than ever, is under great threat from outside black hats.
Unconditional Security based on the quantum basic laws
— QRate
Quantum cryptography, then, according to QRate, can shield[s] [us] from such “future attacks”, [ruling] out the risk of surreptitious communications monitoring by applying basic properties of elementary particles.
The startup’s products cover industrial and academic systems, and include a single-photon detector and a quantum random number generator (QRNG).
It all started in 2015 with the design of an electronic control system. A year later, its quantum key processing platform was rolled out and QRate’s quantum cryptography technology was tested by Gazprom Bank. By 2017, the startup was busy with high-speed control electronics and, in collaboration with Sberbank, a pilot model run.
QRate’s single-photon avalanche detector (SPAD) can be implemented for:
— quantum secured data transfer networks
— photon entanglement experiments
— single-photon generation in quantum optics fibre
— low optical signals detection in microbiology testing
— 3-dimensional high-altitude ground mapping
Leader & Principal Investigator
Kurochkin, as well as being QRate’s CTO is a quantum communication group leader and principal investigator at the Russian Quantum Center. With a team exceeding thirty employees, Kurochkin — with a Ph.D. in physics from Moscow Institute of Physics and Technology — can boast the co-authorship of twenty scientific publications, ranging from Quantum-secured blockchain (2018, 96 citations) to Symmetric blind information reconciliation for quantum key distribution (2017, 28 citations).
Yet, that’s not all for the Russian physicist: his experience in industry, at the likes of The Boston Consulting Group and Gazprom, could come in useful for QRate’s success in quantum cryptography and encrypting banks’ and other industries’ data privacy.
Russia’s reputation in the scientific fields is as impressive as any other country on the planet, and it is startups like QRate, academic institutions the Russian Quantum Center, the National University of Science and Technology (MISIS) and the Deep Quantum Labs Biamonte Group — Skolkovo Institute of Science and Technology, that will be leading quantum information science in the world’s largest country.
