Section: Bilateral Contracts and Grants with Industry

Technological Transfer

The group have had a continuous commitment into industrial transfer as well as a strong involvement into standardization bodies.

Industrial transfer. This activity is related to our long-standing activity in post-quantum cryptography. The transfer started at the beginning of the current evaluation period and culminated this year with the creation of a new spin-off, called CryptoNext Security (https://cryptonext-security.com/), from Inria Paris and Sorbonne Université. The goal of CryptoNext Security is to propose security products that are resistant against the quantum computers. Its business model is based on B2B and targeted customers are Fortune 500 companies.

The activity has been partially founded and supervised by SATT-LUTECH who is specialized in the processing and transfer of technologies from research laboratories of its shareholders: Inria, CNRS, University of Technology of Compiègne, National Museum of Natural History, Institute Curie, University Panthéon-Assas, Paris Sorbonne University and National School of Industrial Creation). Typically, SATT-LUTECH has funded the post-quantum experiment described in the dedicated Section. The impact of such experiment can be partially measured by the press released covering out the test (https://www-polsys.lip6.fr/Links/index.html) (La Recherche, l'Usine Nouvelle, L'Informaticien).

As a preliminary step for launching the spin-off, two members of the team (J.-C. Faugère and L. Perret) followed two entrepreneurship programs for creating innovative companies : HEC Challenge plus (http://entrepreneurship-center.hec.edu/learn-program/hec-challenge-plus/) (1 week of courses by month, 9 months) and Deep Tech Founders (https://deeptechfounders.com/) (3 months, 2 sessions by weeks). This was a necessary, but significant effort, before launching CryptoNext in which the two members will work full-time from now on.

Post-quantum standardization. Besides the NIST PQC standardization process, we are involved in the on-going world effort for standardizing post-quantum cryptography. More precisely, the European Telecommunications Standards Institute (ETSI ) has a strong standardization activity on post-quantum cryptography. ETSI is a EU standardization body with a worldwide scope. We are an active member of ETSI regarding post-quantum cryptography. In particular, we are the rapporteur of a technical document on post-quantum cryptosystems. The goal of our involvement is to bring our scientific expertise to define trustworthy post-quantum public-key standards; that are going to be the basis of our digital economy within $10/15$ years.

We are also involved in the Cloud Security Alliance (CSA ). This is a large non-profit organization (80.000 member worldwide) whose main goal is to promote the best practices with the secure usage of cloud computing. CSA has a group dedicated to quantum-safe security. The group is ideation catalyzer for promoting the transition of companies to a quantum-safe security. In particular, the group has a significant educational activity in order to increase awareness regarding the quantum risk and the techniques to mitigate this risk. We are co-chairing this group and participated to several white papers. The group is probably now the main channel for promoting quantum-safe security. Standardization is a long-term effort.