Cisco Chief Strategy Officer Liz Centoni expects quantum key distribution (QKD) to gain momentum next year as organizations and governments try to address post-quantum security threats.

“Quantum cryptography and transmitting keys is a fundamental risk to security as they can be harvested and decrypted later,” Centoni wrote in her 2023 technology predictions and trends blog.

“While post-quantum cryptography (PQC) is a potential stop-gap solution, it’s unclear if PQC schemes could be broken in the future,” she added. “QKD is poised to be particularly impactful because it avoids any distribution of the keys over an insecure channel. In 2023, in preparation for a post-quantum world, we will see a macro-trend emerge with the adoption of QKD in data centers, IoT, autonomous systems, and 6G.”

Ramana Kompella, distinguished engineer and head of research in the Emerging Tech and Incubation group at Cisco, echoed this prediction and told SDxCentral that Cisco has been making strides in quantum research and development.

SDxCentral: What efforts has Cisco made on QKD development or implementation?

Kompella: Our research team is focused on a wide variety of research areas such as PQC and QKD toward securing the next-generation digital infrastructure. While PQC schemes work with classical networks, QKD requires quantum networks. Cisco Research is looking into converged networking infrastructure for both classical and quantum communication that can support QKD in the future.

We also collaborate closely with academic researchers from various top universities across the world to advance the state-of-the-art in these areas and support their research by providing funding and other resources to achieve impact.

In the past year, Cisco Research has invested in nearly a dozen Quantum projects from universities in the U.S., the U.K., and the E.U. We also recently hosted the second annual Cisco Quantum Summit – a two-day virtual event aimed at bringing together experts to discuss progress toward building the Quantum Internet.

Finally, as part of quantum research and development efforts at Cisco, we are currently accepting research proposals that aim to conduct research in different areas of quantum hardware, software, and applications.