The new technology will serve to protect Beeline's own resources and will also form the basis of a highly secure information transmission service for large corporate clients.
Operator VympelCom (Beeline), together with Russian Railways and the company InfoTeKS, completed pilot trials of quantum key distribution (QKD) technology for organizing secure corporate networks. As the companies note, the new technology will provide a fundamentally new level of data transmission protection for the operator's corporate clients.
QKD is a method of organizing secure communications based on a cryptographic protocol using elements of quantum mechanics. It allows two parties to create a shared random secret key for encrypting and decrypting messages. When there is an attempt to intercept the photons used to generate the keys, their state changes, making the network 100% resistant to hacking.
As part of the pilot, the offices of Beeline and Russian Railways were connected to a node of the Russian Railways Backbone Quantum Network using ViPNet QKD equipment manufactured by InfoTeKS. The tests of the secure client network were successful, confirming the functionality of the technology.
Valery Shorzhin, Deputy CEO of Beeline, noted that quantum networks are suitable for protecting critical infrastructure, financial data, and government communications. Dmitry Gusev, Deputy CEO of InfoTeKS, emphasized that the company was the first on the market to go from scientific research to obtaining certification from the Russian FSB for QKD systems. Valery Tanaev, Deputy CEO of Russian Railways, announced the company's readiness to provide backbone quantum network services to external clients.
