Cryptographic signature schemes are integral to secure and automated distribution of software products/updates -- providing source authentication and proof-of-data integrity. However, existing schemes are based on mathematics vulnerable to quantum computer attack. With quantum computers now becoming a commercial reality, there is an **urgent need for quantum-secure signatures**. Whilst a first-generation of post-quantum (PQ) cryptography standards are emerging, these do not consider broader security threats and are vulnerable to side-channel-attack (SCA) -- whereby private data is inferred by monitoring executional parameters. Although masking countermeasures can be retrospectively applied, these are computationally intensive, resulting in an exponential increase in overhead with masking order. Designed using innovative subroutine building blocks that either don't require masking, or can be masked in quasi-linear time, **Raccoon is** **a world's first PQ signature scheme delivering a computationally efficient 10-fold increase in resistance to SCA**. Raccoon **eliminates the need to compromise between efficiency and security**, and is viable for resource constrained platforms, such as mobile/IoT devices.

Data centres, and the networks and systems that surround them are the future work horse of digitised economies. The data processing that they provide is a well-known driver for economic growth, providing cutting edge storage and computing systems that increasingly underpin all aspects of business and society. These data centres are huge system of systems, comprising thousands of components coming from a diverse, global supply chain. To account for the ever growing amount and complexity of data that needs to be processed these systems are becoming more complex and have started to incorporate novel chip sets within heterogeneous architectures to provide more efficient training of machine learning problems. Quantum technologies, has long been described as the solution to the world's most challenging data problems. Quantum computing has the ability to significantly enhance our ability to process optimisation, machine learning and sorting problems which are beyond the reach of today's computers, and quantum communications provides the answer to ever-increasing challenges of security. However, to date, very little activity has taken place to understand from a systems perspective how quantum technologies can integrate with existing data centres. Quantum computers and communications systems are often described in isolation, more or less at-odds with the direction of the industry for the last 50 years. This misses the possibility for very significant near term value to be created with quantum/classical hybrid systems. For the first time ever, this project seeks look at quantum technologies through the lens of the existing industry. It brings together experts in classical data centres and networking, quantum computing and quantum communications and will develop a blueprint for a quantum/classical hybrid data centre and a quantum internet.

Public key cryptography (PKC) is fundamental to the security of digital communications. Existing PKC standards rely on the difficulty of factoring integers (RSA) or calculating discrete logarithms (Diffie-Hellman/Elliptic-Curves). However, these 'hard problems' are easily broken by emerging quantum computers, creating an imminent security threat. With quantum computers expected to become a commercial reality within the next 10-years, there is an urgent need for new quantum-resistant PKC standards.To reduce computational demand and to improve power efficiency and resilience to side-channel attacks, cryptography systems are frequently implemented with hardware assistance. Such hardware assisted cryptography is essential for (resource constrained) embedded system devices, in application areas such as smart/ID cards, mobile communications, transport, banking, Pay-Tv, IoT devices, wearables, Industry 4.0\.Whilst new 'post-quantum cryptography' schemes have been proposed that are difficult for quantum computers to solve; these utilise mathematical/algorithmic operations vastly different from existing RSA/EC standards for which little engineering tradition exists. Major classes of PQC are lattice-, code-, multivariate polynomial-, isogeny-, and hash-based algorithms.PQShield are mobilising a world-class team to address this challenge and have already achieved important breakthroughs for many PQC algorithm types, including two semi-finalist candidates at the NIST standardisation process of PQC.

Post-quantum cybersecurity: A project that will help prepare the UK for the post-quantum cybersecurity era when a fully functioning quantum computer becomes available. But what's wrong with a quantum computer? Nothing is wrong with it, except that it is conceptually different from a conventional/classical computer and can, therefore, perform some types of computational tasks much faster than classical computers; examples of the computational problems that become easy on a quantum computer include the integer factorisation and discrete logarithm problems, which are the main hard computational problems that our cryptography today relies on. Consequently, a quantum computer can be used to run an algorithm that is able to decrypt any ciphertext that contains confidential data and forge any (currently in use) digital signature scheme. As a result, the whole idea of e-commerce and online transactions/banking will be obsolete! So, how are we going to solve this problem? We will use "different cryptography" to build the post-quantum cybersecurity infrastructure. In fact, the National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST) has just started the process of standardising a new generation of cryptosystems that rely on mathematical problems that are still hard even for a quantum computer to solve. In our project, we will consider these hard mathematical problems and contribute to the standardisation process by evaluating and cryptanalysing the submitted schemes. We will test those schemes by running live yet secure experiments on hybrid cryptosystems ( a combination of a current cryptosystem with a PQ secure one). Finally, our main commercial focus will be Post-Quantum IoT and Cloud Computing Services (CCS), which we believe to be the two biggest markets that make use of cybersecurity.