QCBRIEF
Backed by Israel's R&D funding arm, the Israel Innovation Authority, and chaired by Allot, a small Hod Hasharon network security vendor, a new consortium will test quantum resistant encryption (post quantum cryptography) and physics based key
Israel is organizing telecom defenses around a threat called "harvest now, decrypt later": adversaries copying encrypted voice, data, and satellite traffic today and storing it for later quantum-computer decryption. The Israel Innovation Authority (IIA), the country's R&D funding arm, is backing a new Post-Quantum Communications Consortium to test whether hybrid defenses can close that window.
The consortium's research spans three layers: pure post-quantum cryptography (PQC) software algorithms, physical-layer quantum key distribution (QKD), and hybrid PQC+QKD systems running across the Open Systems Interconnect (OSI) network stack (optical transport, Ethernet, IP routing, 5G/6G mobile cores, satellite channels, and cloud).
Allot Ltd. (NASDAQ: ALLT), a small Hod Hasharon network-security vendor, chairs the consortium; VP CTO Dr. Yaakov Stein leads the scientific committee. Partners include NVIDIA, Elta Systems, Ceragon, Gilat Satellite Networks, RAD Data Communications, Heqa, Classiq, and Ribbon Communications. Six universities will run research: Technion, Bar-Ilan, Hebrew University, Ben-Gurion, Open University, and the University of Haifa.
What the consortium does not yet have: independent confirmation from the IIA, any participating university, or a second partner. Hybrid PQC+QKD also carries well-known deployment limits (distance, trusted-node count, key rate) that a vendor-led coordination model alone does not solve.