Ciena, Toshiba, and Quantum Corridor deployed a 1.6 Tb/s (1.6T) quantum-safe optical encryption across a live commercial network in Midwest U.S.

Deployed on Quantum Corridor’s live commercial network between data centers in Chicago and Hammond, Indiana, the demo was framed as safeguarding critical infrastructure against harvest-now, decrypt-later attacks, while proving quantum-proofed security doesn’t impact network capacity.

Ciena’s part in the proceedings came with its Waveserver platform, as underpinned by the coherent optics of its WaveLogic 6 Extreme (WL6e) platform as well as existing WaveLogic 5 Extreme (WL5e) 800G encrypted traffic running on the same reconfigurable line system (RLS) photonic line system. Ciena touted a simple upgrade could give existing users of Ciena’s WL5e encryption solution the same level of data protection with support for post-quantum cryptography (PQC) algorithms approved by the National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST).

The demo also leveraged Toshiba’s quantum key distribution (QKD) servers, which provided quantum-generated keys to each of Ciena’s optical encryption systems and allowing Quantum Corridor’s network to secure encrypted channels via a co-propagating QKD system.

“By validating 1.6 Tb/s encrypted connectivity with both PQC and QKD on our live network, we’re demonstrating how we can help customers transition to a quantum secure solution while continuing to support the bandwidth demands of AI, cloud, and mission-critical applications,” Quantum Corridor CTO Ryan Lafler explained.

In an interview ahead of the announcement, Paulina Gomez, director of portfolio marketing at Ciena, stressed the system’s “crypto-agility” in upgrading to the latest algorithms, as well as its support for a hybrid security approach in merging classical computing with the pure quantum computing technology of QKD.

“Customers decide: do you want to use QKD, or do you want to use the PQC algorithms?" Gomez said. "That's in our software right now as a default mode of operation, but it's something that is configurable and can be disabled if you want to use classical or you don't want to use the PQC algorithms for whatever reason."

Gomez noted that the European Union and Canada are pushing more of a hybrid stance compared to the more classical nature of using only PQCs. Generally, clients still prefer the standardized nature of PQC, with QKD involving complex technicalities and additional expenses for implementation.

“QKD is still understood to be the highest level of security because it's proven to offer unconditional security from a mathematical perspective as it’s all quantum based," Gomez said. "But it does have some limitations in terms of distance, so it’s not applicable everywhere.”

The issue of distance limitations can theoretically be solved by quantum repeater technology that would sit along the network and "refresh" the signal so QKD is able to travel much farther.

Ciena’s footprint here comes from its work with the Canadian Space Agency and the University of Waterloo in exploring QKD distribution using satellite signals, something that’s also being explored by the likes of European telecom infrastructure player Cellnex.

“This is testing some of the limitations in terms of getting the keys from a satellite, say if it's cloudy, but that's a way that looks very promising in terms of what could come next to be able to use QKDs and really extend that distance using satellites,” Gomez said.