January 20, 2025 -- Following an announcement of opportunity published in August 2022, the CSA recently awarded over $1.4 million in contribution to QEYnet (Maple, Ontario) for the demonstration of a low-cost, Earth-to-space quantum key distribution (QKD) technology.

Satellites are vital to the infrastructure of our rapidly advancing technological world. We rely on them daily for navigation, weather forecasting, and communication. To protect against cyberattacks, satellites encrypt their communications using keys that are loaded before launch. If those keys are compromised after launch, there is no way to load new ones. And with the emergence of powerful, next-generation computers, current encryption methods risk becoming obsolete in the near future.

QEYnet is developing a solution to address these issues by using QKD, which leverages the quantum properties of individual light energy particles, also known as photons, to generate encryption keys that are mathematically guaranteed to resist undetected eavesdropping.

This technology will be tested in space to evaluate its performance. The objectives are to demonstrate the ability to load new keys in orbit, demonstrate QKD between locations on Earth, and confirm the concept of operations for this cutting-edge technology.