Focus: Trust, identity, and security rooted in hardware

1. Design and validate a high-speed hardware encryption system capable of sustaining real-time higher throughput. The challenge is to demonstrate reliable, continuous operation that matches theoretical performance in practical hardware.

2. Design a hardware-based secure storage system that encrypts sensitive data using secrets derived from quantum keys. The solution must provide post-quantum resilience and protection against physical and logical attacks.

3. Develop a lightweight hardware authentication mechanism for resource-constrained devices that ensures secure identity verification. The design must minimise power consumption, area usage, and authentication latency.

4. Design a robust hardware true random number generator (TRNG) that produces high-entropy random numbers with built-in testing. The system must remain reliable under bias, environmental variations, and hardware faults.

Focus: Scalable, high-speed, hardware-efficient quantum security

1. Develop a lightweight, high-speed privacy amplification framework for quantum security systems that balances strong security with hardware efficiency. The solution must scale to high data rates while minimising complexity and power.

2. Develop a hardware-efficient QKD framework that combines high-speed sifting with lightweight key derivation. The design must generate secure keys from quantum data with low latency and minimal hardware overhead.

3. Design an FPGA-based time-to-digital converter (TDC) capable of achieving ~50 ps timing resolution with high-speed and low-power operation. The solution must accurately measure short time intervals for time-of-flight and single-photon applications such as QKD and be validated on real hardware.

4. QKD Protocol Simulators: Develop a Python-based simulator for the BB84 or E91 protocol that models quantum channel attenuation, detector noise, and eavesdropping attacks to calculate and visualise Quantum Bit Error Rate (QBER) and Secret Key Rate (SKR).

5. QKD Network Simulators: Create a simulation environment for a multi-node trusted-relay QKD network, implementing and benchmarking dynamic routing algorithms that optimise key consumption and reduce latency under varying traffic loads.

6. Key Manager Suite for QKD Nodes: Build a secure Key Management System (KMS) for QKD nodes, supporting secure key storage, ETSI GS QKD 014-compliant APIs, and synchronisation between Alice and Bob nodes.

7. Control and Management Software for QKD: Develop a dashboard application to monitor QKD hardware, visualise real-time metrics such as QBER and alignment status, manage logs, and trigger alerts for failures or security threshold breaches.

8. ETSI-Compliant SDN Stack for QKD: Implement a software agent compliant with ETSI GS QKD 015 to expose QKD network topology and link capabilities to an SDN controller for centralised orchestration.

Focus: Reliability and scalability of quantum computation

1. Design and benchmark quantum error correction algorithms on simulators and real quantum hardware to study fault tolerance and threshold behaviour. The goal is to analyse trade-offs and identify hardware-native codes that improve the reliability of practical quantum computation.

Focus: Field readiness, diagnostics, and certification of quantum systems

1. Develop a machine-learning–based framework to identify root causes of performance degradation in field-deployable QKD systems using operational and environmental data. The solution must enable anomaly detection, predictive maintenance, and system performance optimisation.

2. Design robust security testing and evaluation methodologies to identify vulnerabilities and validate the practical security of QKD implementations. The framework must support benchmarking, certification readiness, and real-world interoperability.