• Small independent UK cybersecurity company, Sitehop, is the first invited to partner with BT at its state-of-the-art Gemini quantum R&D centre 
• BT’s transformation strategy is now “super-open” to collaborating with all partners, big or small 
• Sitehop’s all-UK-built SAFE encryption and decryption system is seen as a winner
• Sitehop says its SAFE solutions are already live in a Tier 1 carrier network across five countries

As quantum computing and AI combine to present an ever greater threat to the security of telecoms and IT networks and the data they carry, Sitehop, an independent cybersecurity company based in the UK city of Sheffield, has struck a partnership with UK national telco BT for the development of a quantum-safe networking solution. 

The startup has teamed up with BT for a quantum-safe networking proof of concept (PoC) that, without compromising network performance, aims to “accelerate UK-based testing of quantum-ready encryption” by delivering field programmable gate array (FPGA)-powered, quantum-ready encryption hardware with sub-microsecond latency and ultra-low power consumption to protect data whilst it is in motion across global comms networks.

FPGAs are a type of integrated circuit that can be configured by a user after manufacturing. Very different from their ASIC (application-specific integrated circuit) cousins, FPGAs are highly flexible and can be reprogrammed to perform different tasks, a characteristic that makes them particularly useful for prototyping, testing, and for final system designs in high-performance computing and embedded systems. 

The PoC is underway at BT’s Gemini test laboratory and environment at the telco’s R&D headquarters based in Adastral Park in Suffolk, UK. Gemini is an exact replica of BT’s live network and, as such, is claimed to be the biggest and most advanced telecom test environment in Europe. 

Understandably, Sitehop is very pleased to be the first small, sovereign startup company to be asked to partner with BT on this development. Hitherto, access to the Gemini facility has been limited to a select number of major vendors as BT’s quantum research to date has, primarily, been concentrated on the security of the biggest networks.

However, earlier this year, Gabriela Styf Sjöman, the managing director of BT’s research and networks strategy, accepted that the successful exploitation of quantum telecoms will rely on collaboration with companies of all shapes and sizes and announced that BT is “super open” to working with others. She said, “We need more technology and research partners in BT. We need more adoption partners, an ecosystem. It’s not enough to just work with research, we need to work with industry who will be adopting… we need to understand the use case and we’ll also need to understand what the barriers are for the private sector to adopt this technology. And we also need commercialisation partners.” 

BT has been attracted by Sitehop’s SAFE Series encryption and decryption system. It is built entirely in the UK and, via its hardware-first approach, is said to eliminate the currently necessary, but potentially dangerous, trade-offs between maximising security whilst maintaining peak network performance and speed. SAFE does so by providing “crypto-agile”, high-throughput encryption and decryption for global, multi-tenant networks by securing data in motion across telecom, finance, government and other critical infrastructure. 

In a press release celebrating its partnership with BT, Sitehop notes: “Our mission is to demonstrate how our high-speed, low-power, post-quantum-ready encryption hardware and network management can meet BT’s performance, interoperability and security standards, and potentially qualify for ‘Safe to Connect’ certification, BT’s highest trust benchmark. This collaboration represents more than a technical validation. It signals a shift, a growing belief that agile, sovereign innovators have a critical role to play in securing and accelerating the UK’s digital infrastructure with a foundation of engineering and innovation. For both sides, this trial is about more than devices. It is about testing an approach for the future where the UK’s network leaders and security innovators work together to create the kind of infrastructure the country, and the world, needs.”

BT’s ‘transformation strategy’ is based on its ability and intent to build “the best, most trusted digital networks” and “accelerate modernisation to restore leadership in everything BT does”, and Sitehop says its technology has been engineered to help by greatly reducing legacy bottlenecks with ultra-low latency, FPGA-based encryption, delivering 100 Gbit/s performance with crypto agility built in. The company says, “Our plug-and-play devices support scalable deployments from the core to the edge, without sacrificing simplicity or cost-efficiency. Sitehop uses just a tenth of the power of traditional solutions while delivering 10,000 times lower latency than software-based alternatives.These are not incremental improvements. They are exponential gains, the kind that can help us unlock the next generation of UK connectivity.”

Teaming up with BT on quantum-safe networking developments is a coup for Sitehop as the UK telco is one of the leaders in the sector, having launched its initial quantum-safe data transport service as long ago as 2022 – see BT boasts quantum security breakthrough with Toshiba, EY. 

Naturally, BT has continued to develop its services and invest in further quantum-safe communications research and development over the past few years – see BT & Toshiba team with Equinix for quantum-safe connectivity and BT’s research chief on quantum-safe networking and network APIs. 

And the UK operator has just been identified as the telco sector’s pioneer in the quantum-safe networking sector – see BT, DT seen as quantum-safe networking pioneers. 

Tier 1 experience

In addition to its tests and trials with BT, Sitehop says its SAFE solutions are already deployed in a Tier 1 carrier network “across several countries, delivering post-quantum, cryptography-ready security to large enterprise, telecoms and government customers.” According to the company this deployment comprises seven of its units deployed across Germany, India, the Netherlands, Singapore and the US, but the company declined to identify the operator involved.  

Sitehop was founded in 2022 and funded by a range of UK investors, including Amadeus Capital Partners and Mercia (the Northern Powerhouse Investment Fund), both of which are represented on the Sitehop board of directors. Sitehop itself is also collaborating with Red Helix, the Aylesbury, UK-based managed network and security testing and threat protection company. Having been awarded a “five-figure productivity grant” from the South Yorkshire Mayoral Authority, Sitehop has invested it in a Teledyne LeCroy Xena Loki 100G traffic-generation and testing platform, which enables bi-directional testing of sub-microsecond latency (835 nanoseconds) in 100 Gbit/s network encryption.

The testing covers peak load conditions, burst traffic, error injection and fault recovery as well as end-to-end encrypted traffic flows. Multi-stream stress tests, mixed protocol environments, and real-time encrypted traffic benchmarking are also all part of the processes. Such attributes help Sitehop to prove its SAFEcore platform has the performance parameters and resilience in high-bandwidth, low-latency environments and is ready for new use cases, such as 5G backhaul, wearable security technology and the evolution of post-quantum cryptography.

– Martyn Warwick, Editor in Chief, TelecomTV