Voyager and IBM have demonstrated something that would have sounded like science fiction a year ago: a communication link between Earth and the International Space Station secured against attacks from future quantum computers. Announced April 15, the test used Voyager's Space Edge Micro Datacenter, which arrived at the ISS last September, running IBM Quantum Safe Remediator software. The demo sent traffic protected by NIST-standardized post-quantum cryptography from orbit to ground, and back. Voyager Technologies
The technical part is straightforward. IBM Quantum Safe Remediator sits as a proxy around legacy applications inside Space Edge. To the outside world, it speaks post-quantum cryptography. Internally, it translates to classical encryption that the legacy apps already understand. No application code changes. No hardware swap. That is the crypto-agility problem in a nutshell: most orbital computers have embedded encryption that cannot be updated without physically replacing them, which is not an option once they are in low Earth orbit. IBM Quantum blog
Ray Harishankar, an IBM Fellow for Quantum Safe, described it as a facade. "IBM Quantum Safe Remediator acts as an intelligent proxy around a legacy application," he said in Voyager's announcement. "Internally, it speaks classical encryption, granting the ability to upgrade existing cryptography from classical to post-quantum."
This is not theoretical. The harvest-now, decrypt-later threat is already operative. Satellites transmit enormous volumes of sensitive data, from national defense communications to weather instrumentation to commercial telecommunications. Research has demonstrated that this traffic can be intercepted with off-the-shelf equipment. More than 12,000 satellites now populate low Earth orbit, serving government, military and commercial applications. Voyager Technologies The window between now and when cryptographically relevant quantum computers arrive is the danger zone, and the thinking among security experts is that every day in that window is a day encrypted data is being collected and stored.
Dennis Gatens, CEO and founder of LEOcloud at Voyager, framed the stakes in operational terms. "Before, data was generated in space and brought back to Earth to analyze," he said. "Now, it's happening on-orbit and it's important to maintain the integrity and security of that data." That shift, from download-and-process to compute-at-the-source, is what makes the security question urgent in a way it was not five years ago. Voyager Technologies
JR Rao, IBM Fellow and CTO for Security Research, pointed past the ISS demo toward the more demanding problem ahead. "As we move forward with lunar and deep space missions, we need infrastructure with crypto-agility," he said. "The ability to replace cryptographic algorithms in an agile fashion." Lunar and deep space missions cannot call home for a firmware update. The hardware needs to be right the first time, and flexible enough to survive a standards transition that is still being finalized. Voyager Technologies
IBM's position in this story is worth naming. When NIST published its first batch of post-quantum cryptography standards in 2024, two of the three finalized algorithms came from IBM's research. Voyager Technologies IBM has a commercial interest in demonstrating that those standards work in operational environments. This demo is also that demonstration.
The NIST mandate requires all U.S. government agencies to adopt a post-quantum cryptography posture by 2035. Voyager Technologies The commercial sector is moving faster in some cases. Cloudflare has targeted 2029 for full post-quantum security across its network. The question is whether the infrastructure that cannot be physically replaced, the hardware already in orbit, gets there in time.
Space Edge on the ISS is a proof of concept. The next step, if this team has its way, is a version that scales to lunar missions and beyond. Whether that happens before the danger zone closes is the actual story.
