(GlobeNewsWire) WISeKey International Holding Ltd. (“WISeKey”) (SIX: WIHN, NASDAQ: WKEY), a leading global cybersecurity and IoT company, and MINES Saint-Etienne Research Institute (“MINES Saint-Etienne”), an internationally renowned multidisciplinary university and labs created in 1816, today announced they are starting a new R&D cooperation to help the international community find cryptography algorithms that will resist future quantum computing based cyber-attacks. They will jointly participate in the related US National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST) standardization program (NIST PQC) launched in 2016.
The French Quantum Program was launched by President Macron in January 2021, and worth 1.8 billion euros over 5 years, France has rejoint the USA and China in the Top-3 countries leading this international race.
WISeKey and MINES Saint-Etienne will be cooperating in this context.
This cooperation will take place on both the theoretical and the practical grounds:
-WISeKey brings its decades of expertise in designing Common Criteria EAL5+ and FIPS 140-2 Level 3 certified hardware based secure elements (MS600x secure microcontrollers, VaultIC™, …) and in developing hacker resistant firmware. The new algorithms to be evaluated will first have to practically run on WISeKey’s existing and new hardware architectures. The company will also share its expertise in deep learning AI techniques to prove the robustness of the implementations.
-MINES Saint-Etienne has developed an international expertise in applied mathematics, cryptography and computational sciences since its inception, more than two centuries ago. Inspiring innovation is at the heart of this public academy, as demonstrated by many studies and publications acknowledged by the worldwide scientific community. Highly qualified PhD researchers and students will be involved in this public/private unique partnership.