100 Gbps Quantum-safe IPsec VPN Tunnels over 46 km Deployed Fiber

TL;DR

This paper demonstrates the first high-speed 100 Gbps quantum-safe IPsec VPN tunnels over 46 km of deployed fiber, integrating Quantum Key Distribution (QKD) for enhanced security in real-world telecom infrastructure.

Contribution

It presents a novel practical deployment of quantum-safe VPN tunnels at 100 Gbps over real fiber, utilizing QKD technology and API integration for secure key exchange.

Findings

Achieved 80 Gbps throughput with a single QKD-secured VPN tunnel.

Demonstrated 99.62 Gbps aggregated throughput with multiple tunnels.

Maintained stable operation over 45 days in an air-gapped environment.

Abstract

We demonstrated for the first time quantum-safe high-speed 100 Gbps site-to-site IPsec tunnels secured using Quantum Key Distribution (QKD) technology. The demonstration was conducted between two JPMorgan Chase Data Centers (DCs) in an air-gapped environment over 46 km of deployed telecom fiber across Singapore achieving 45 days of continuous operation. Two different Virtual Private Network (VPN) tunnel configurations were tested: (1) a QKD-secured VPN tunnel configuration with a maximum throughput of 80 Gbps and (2) a multi-VPN tunnel configuration exhibiting 12 QKD-secured VPN tunnels with a throughput of 8.39 Gbps per tunnel resulting in an aggregated throughput of 99.62 Gbps for all tunnels. For the QKD system performance, we achieved an average Secret Key Rate (SKR) of 7.4 kbps (about 29 AES-256 keys per second), an average Quantum Bit Error Rate (QBER) of 0.8% and an average visibility of 98.6%. We utilized the ETSI-QKD-014 REST-based Application Programming Interface (API) to exchange the QKD generated keys between the key management server in the QKD system and the next-generation firewalls in order to encrypt and decrypt the data. The data was encrypted by the quantum-safe keys using the AES-256-GCM cipher suite with a key refresh rate of 120 seconds without affecting the VPN tunnel connectivity and performance