PiQASO at a glance: Building Europe’s Quantum-Safe Future

Over the past two decades internet technology developments have dramatically impacted people's lives. Nowadays, almost every aspect of daily life activity is strongly correlated with the use of the internet.

Based on a recent study, the amount of time that each user spends online was just under seven hours per day, whereas the global consumer internet traffic exceeded the enormous amount of 188 EB per month in 2025.

Through the past ten years, by the significant increment of the users' awareness to privacy protection and data security, strong encryption has become widely used in Internet network communication since it is more than critical for protecting sensitive business and personal data.

In 2014, less than half of all web traffic was encrypted, according to Google, whereas, today the rate of network encryption stands at 95%, including communication between web applications and servers, such as a web browser loading a website, to other communications such as email, messaging, e-commerce, banking, file storage, and voice-over IP. From bank account numbers to passwords, everything is encrypted, employing several types of standard cryptographic algorithms including symmetric-key and public-key algorithms to secure all types of digital communication and they are necessary for basic privacy, trust, and security on the web.

However, with the escalation in computing power enabled by the rise of quantum technology, it is now inevitable that the encryption algorithms used to secure vital data across the world – from defence and banking to infrastructure and air travel - will be breached upon the availability of fully error-corrected quantum computers, which according to experts could be as soon as 2030, known as “Q-day”. By adopting “harvest now, decrypt later” strategies, adversaries are already preparing for that day, thus it is of paramount importance to accelerate and advance in the transition to PQC now, to prevent a potential privacy apocalypse in the near future.

To that end, PiQASO sits at the forefront of digital transformation for new quantum-resistant infrastructures by preparing the existing communication networks for the Quantum era through its holistic framework, ensuring the wide coverage of Quantum resistant cryptographic primitives and protocols in various application domains and systems’ setup. PiQASO aspires to provide fully optimized and operational implementations as-a-service for an ensemble of crypto algorithms and protocols, including key encapsulation, digital signatures, (authenticated) key exchange, authorization, identity management, long-term data security, multi-party secure computation, providing a fully functional equivalent of Public Key Infrastructure (PKI) which is robust against future algorithmic and quantum computing advances but also practical enough to be integrated in CTS and infrastructures without the need of any additional specialist hardware to be installed on the client side, thus, enabling quantum-safe application-layer encryption/decryption services that can be consumed by any legacy system.

The envisioned solution includes the development of programmable optimizations and accelerators capable of enhancing the execution of a multitude of crypto families, in a cost-effective manner, with the additional benefit of designing for crypto agility; the ability to reconfigure an application or system with a different PQ crypto algorithm or implementation depending on requirements and resource availability. PiQASO crypto agility is supported through the provision of operational (specification) implementations of NIST final candidates (Dilithium, FALCON, SPHINCS+), enabling quantum-safe application-layer encryption/decryption services that can be consumed by any legacy system. This aims to enable users and systems to make coordinated transitions in a policy- and compliance-governed manner.

To that, PiQASO’s PQC Ensemble is offered through a set of design modalities with certifiable security. Moreover, PiQASO features an extensive and ambitious demonstration plan involving 14 end-users from diverse industrial sectors, such as automotive, automation, finance, energy, healthcare, aerospace, online media, Unmanned Aerial Vehicles, and transportation.