Qrypt, a quantum-secure encryption company, has announced the launch of its Quantum Entropy and Quantum Secure Key Generation technologies. These technologies will be used to transmit AI workloads using NVIDIA BlueField-3 DPUs with quantum-secure encryption, providing protection against quantum computing threats to current cryptography.
Most recently, Qrypt announced a Phase 1 contract with the Air Force to enhance national defense capabilities against quantum threats.
The announcement of the partnership between NVIDIA and Qrypt is a logical next step in this ambition, as Qrypt provides highly secure entropy, specifically in this context:
- Qrypt offers quantum-secure encryption for AI workloads using NVIDIA BlueField-3 DPUs. This protects against potential security risks from future quantum computers.
- Qrypt’s technology generates encryption keys without transmitting them over the network. This eliminates a major vulnerability (“harvest now, decrypt later”) in current encryption methods.
- Qrypt leverages modern technologies like virtualization and distributed infrastructure for high-level security and redundancy. This is a significant improvement over the traditional cryptographic security model.
Qrypt’s technology integrates directly into IPsec, which is traditionally used by NVIDIA BlueField DPU to set up encrypted connections between AI clusters. This integration allows for key generation and establishment without transmitting keys, establishing a quantum-secure channel. Qrypt’s solution uses true quantum random entropy to generate all key materials, ensuring the highest-quality encryption keys for securing the AI clusters. These keys are never transmitted across the network, eliminating the “harvest now, decrypt later” vulnerability. Qrypt’s Quantum Secure Encryption generates one-time pads and symmetric keys at multiple endpoints, providing unbreakable encryption.
The integration of Qrypt’s technology with the DPUs enables both North-South and East-West quantum secure traffic, with direct connections or over the internet. For example, if one DPU is in an enterprise data center and the other in an Nvidia data center, they can establish a quantum secure link even if the adversary controls all the external channels. Inside the data center, Qrypt has already shown this on multiple connected DPUs in different servers – this eliminates the risks from a nefarious sys admin or anyone in the data center with physical access to the DPUs from being able to harvest any useful data for exfiltration. Both issues have been a barrier for compliance industry companies using GPU clusters in the cloud to train AI data.
While all of these technologies remain to survive battle testing, they offer innovative approaches to new problems:
- Focuses on Post-Quantum Cryptography (PQC): The article acknowledges the limitations of current encryption methods against quantum computers and offers a PQC solution. This is a crucial step for securing data in the quantum computing age.
- Reduces reliance on Public Key Infrastructure (PKI): Eliminating public key transmission for key exchange addresses a vulnerability in PKI systems. This can potentially improve security.
- Leverages Quantum Random Number Generation (QRNG): Using true quantum randomness for key generation is a significant advantage. QRNG provides keys with higher entropy, making them more difficult to crack.
What we expect to see more of to assess current impact and future potential includes some of the following:
- Additional study of the technical details: Specifics on the underlying protocols like BLAST have been published on the IACR website. Additional details and diagrams can be found on the technology page of the Qrypt website.
- Focuses on marketing over technical specifics: The emphasis is on broad claims of security and uniqueness without a deep dive into the technical aspects. This makes it hard to evaluate the solution’s effectiveness.
- Unclear on Single Point of Failure (SPOF) elimination: While they claim to eliminate SPOFs, it’s not clear how Qrypt’s architecture achieves this. More details are needed to understand this aspect.
Denis Mandich, CTO of Qrypt, said “Our vision is to deploy this everywhere in the world and transform the cryptographic architecture of the internet itself, which was really designed and built around monetizing and data mining. We think that should go away and we should restore privacy the same way we had it before the internet existed. This is a way to do it.”
Qrypt is a member of NVIDIA Inception, a program designed to help startups evolve faster by providing support in areas including marketing, technology, and financing. You can view a press release with additional details about this development on the Qrypt website here.
March 15, 2024