SandboxAQ has confirmed the successful deployment of its AQtive Guard cryptography management platform by the Advanced Research Group of SoftBank.
As part of the validation process, SoftBank leveraged AQtive Guard to monitor a local government network for potential cryptographic vulnerabilities. As a result, it discovered several government servers were using non-recommended encryption methods or sending unencrypted traffic and detected several vulnerable certificates that required updates.
The SoftBank team was able to then take the appropriate actions to resolve those issues.
SoftBank and SandboxAQ have previously partnered on several successful PQC-related projects.
In March 2022, the companies collaborated to jointly implement a next-generation cryptosystem resilient to cyber-attacks from quantum computers and verify the use of PQC for practical applications such as VPNs.
In February 2023, the companies collaborated to jointly verify hybrid-mode quantum-safe technology.
The proof of concept confirmed that combining elliptic curve cryptography (ECC) and PQC algorithms in a hybrid approach could be applied to existing networks with minimal impact.
In the US, the National Institute of Standards and Technology is promoting the Migration to Post-Quantum Cryptography project in anticipation of a quantum computer capable of decrypting the 2048-bit RSA cipher by 2030 and will determine the cryptographic algorithms to be adopted as PQC in 2024.
Migrating to these new cryptosystems, deployed via cryptographic agility, can help with adoption of Zero Trust Architecture.
In 2022, the U.S. Presidential Executive Order directed government agencies to inventory IT systems using encryption vulnerable to quantum computers.
