The engineer that protects us from the hackers armed with quantum technology.

Carlos Abellán (Barcelona, ​​1990) is founder and CEO of Quside, a spin-off of the Institute of Photonic Science (ICFO). This Telecommunications engineer and PhD in Photonics was one of the chosen ones in the last edition of Innovators under 35 years of MIT Techology Review in Europe. The award recognizes young people whose work will mark the technological advances of the coming decades. Quantum Quside chips can be installed on any connected device to achieve unbreakable encryption The field in which Abellán is innovating is that of information security and communications. Not only the current teams, also looking at the future quantum computers, an area for which large groups like IBM has bet strongly. "The current encryption systems are very limited in a world with all kinds of devices connected to the network and with an increasing amount of information stored in the cloud," he tells Sinc. As he explains, Quside uses the most modern photonic integration technology to design and produce components that generate random numbers at a rate of billions of bits per second. These devices can be installed on any computer that is connected to the network to protect your data and communications. "  

"The biggest advantage of using quantum technology like ours is that we make sure that the generated numbers that are used to encrypt the information and its transmission are truly random and, therefore, unpredictable for any hacker. This guarantees that the protection keys will be safe not only today but also in the future, "he points out. The technology is available in the market in the form of a card called Qucard that can be installed on computers. The company has also developed a photonic chip, which uses light instead of electrons, which they have called Qupic, which is still in the prototype phase. Both devices can be integrated into servers, mobile phones, tablets, autonomous cars, smart homes and offices, drones, etc. In general, any computer connected to the internet. "The business potential is huge," says the engineer. The company has among its clients data center device manufacturers and telecommunications companies, which use their quantum technology to improve the encryption systems that use their products.  

Another challenge facing the computer security and communications sector is quantum computing. "Current cybersecurity algorithms are considered safe because they are very difficult to decipher for a conventional computer. But the enormous power of quantum computers could solve them without problems ", highlights Abellán. If today there were a quantum computer with enough qubits (quantum bits), all communications on the Internet would be unprotected. Therefore -he points out- "it would be necessary to integrate and deploy solutions based on products like ours before the security of our communications collapses, and thus ensure long-term online security"