Overview:

PQSecure™ Technologies, LLC is a leading provider of cryptographic hardware solutions. We offer an array of symmetric, public key, classical, and post-quantum cryptographic solutions, which we offer independently or packaged as complete cryptographic solution like Suite-Q™ HW. PQSecure’s hardware IP solutions offer various levels of recommended security, size, and performance configurability in numerous markets and applications.

The term hardware solution is typically referencing a physical circuit boards or chips that have been designed or manufactured for a specific job. This option is typically faster since it is specially designed, as well as more energy/power efficient. However, being physically created and installed usually makes these solutions more expensive to implement and more difficult to change or update. To learn more about software solutions, please check our software solutions page.

The two main hardware solution types are FPGAs (Field Programmable Gate Arrays) and ASIC (Application-Specific Integrated Circuit). FPGAs are traditionally used as a design tool because they are inexpensive (in comparison) and re-programmable but are also being implemented in industry and defense sectors where mass production of ASICs is not necessary. If a solution does need to be mass produced then typically once it is designed and tested on an FPGA, it is then manufactured and produced as ASIC chips. ASICs have a high setup cost, but manufacturing thousands at a time helps distribute this cost.  At PQSecure we develop and implement ready-to-deploy hardware solutions for both FPGA and ASIC designs, depending on the needs and limitations of the device.

Benefits:

The choices for digital security are always a choice between hardware solutions, software solutions, or some combination.

  • Fast – having dedicated hardware can increased the performance speed by a factor of 10 or more.
  • Efficient – dedicated, specialty designed hardware reduces energy and power consumption.
  • Tamper Resistant – hardware is not susceptible to buffer overflows and fault injects like software and thus is less susceptible to being compromised remotely.

Uses:

While there are many benefits, hardware solutions are also more costly to implement and maintain. Thus, in high performance cloud and server settings, we realize customers can easily choose hardware, or software, or some combination all with perfectly acceptable performance. However, in low power/energy devices and devices with small built in memory like Internet-of-Things (IoT)  and other connected devices, the only feasible option may be hardware.

IoT devices are literally everywhere around us today. Have a voice-controlled speaker, smart thermostat, or doorbell camera? How about a smart fridge or coffeemaker? Even yoga mats, potted plants, and light bulbs can be smart today and part of the IoT environment. It is expected that the average household will contain more than 50 devices connected to the home’s network. When you include health, transportation, businesses, highways, oceans, and even space, it is easy to see how we will get to 50 billion connected devices by year end and 125 billion by 2030. As these devices continue to grow in popularity and necessity the need to secure them properly increases as well.

Highly optimized hardware solutions are ideal for IoT devices. A dedicated hardware crypto-processor reduces power consumption and execution time while being able to offer additional security features. In addition, we also provide high performance solutions for high performance crypto-processors for the applications where speed matters. We offer hardware solutions that are secure against classical/traditional attacks, as well as quantum resistant solutions (i.e. post-quantum or quantum-safe), as our name suggests. All of our solutions are backed by years of research and engineering so we may offer the best possible solutions available for your products.

 Support:

PQSecure team has wide experience in aspects of secure protocol design, research and development, cryptographic engineering, training, as well as post-quantum cryptography.  Our expertise and skill set will help customers to meet and exceed their goals a timely and cost-effective manner. The cryptographic engineering and security is a cutting edge area and gets updates as technology progresses. Our highly qualified team with extensive mathematics and engineering background with cross affiliations with academia are highly up-to-date to address the customers’ to date needs.