Singapore’s National Quantum-Safe Network (NQSN) testbed has been named one of the 15 finalists in the Digital Frontiers category at Digital@UNGA, a United Nations General Assembly-anchored platform convened by the International Telecommunication Union (ITU) and the United Nations Development Programme (UNDP) to explore how digital technologies can drive progress for people and prosperity everywhere. Of the 15 finalists, NQSN is the only project involving quantum technologies.
NQSN was shortlisted from 1500 submissions from 146 countries across four award categories, of which the Digital Frontiers category is one. The shortlists were announced on 24 August and include a federated AI platform from CERN, the European Organisation for Nuclear Research, an open data platform for maternal and child health from Brazil and a digital identity system from Sudan.
“International recognition for Singapore’s work on building a quantum-safe network, and for sharing the lessons openly, is a huge validation on the effort that our team and partners have put into our testbed over the past few years. Our goal is to show what the infrastructure of the future might look like,” says Alexander Ling, who leads the NQSN team. He is a Principal Investigator at Singapore’s Centre for Quantum Technologies (CQT) and Professor in the National University of Singapore’s Department of Physics.
The NQSN testbed, first established in 2022, forms part of Singapore’s National Quantum Strategy to enable collaboration between industry, academia and government agencies. The team is now working with more than 30 organisations and has access to over 1,500 km of deployed telecom fibre spanning the city.
That fibre is being used for trials of quantum key distribution (QKD), which builds security from the quantum properties of light, and post-quantum cryptography, which integrates new cryptographic algorithms designed to resist attacks by both conventional and quantum computers.
The network has already demonstrated applications such as data transfer between data centres and cloud computing secured by QKD. The team has also been contributing to the development of local and international standards.
“Through our standardisation work on QKD, we have a long partnership with ITU, one of the organisers of this award,” explains Hao Qin, a CQT Senior Research Fellow who leads standardisation and certification work for NQSN. He helped to organise previous ITU workshops in Singapore and serves as the contact person for the team’s prize submission.
Currently, NQSN is run by some ten academic staff and students, with Hao Qin and CQT Senior Research Fellow Haw Jing Yan working on the network full time.
“Quantum-safe migration is not a trivial journey. The testbed gives solution providers and end users a place to work through the practical gaps together with us,” says Jing Yan, who works on the testbed trials.
