The Financial Authority of Singapore (MAS) and 4 main banks have examined quantum know-how to guard important monetary information from future cyber threats and have now revealed the outcomes.

MAS labored with DBS, HSBC, OCBC, UOB, SPTel and SpeQtral to run a proof-of-concept sandbox in two phases.

The primary ran from September to November 2024 with DBS and OCBC, and the second from January to March 2025 with HSBC and UOB.

The venture trialled Quantum Key Distribution (QKD) on Singapore’s Nationwide Quantum-Secure Community Plus infrastructure to guage the way it may safe delicate information transfers between banks and the regulator.

The sandbox deployed remoted QKD stacks to encrypt and decrypt settlement information between the banks and MAS, whereas measuring metrics comparable to Safe Key Price and Quantum Bit Error Price.

It additionally simulated eavesdropping assaults and fibre disconnections.

The system maintained safe operations throughout outages by drawing on a buffer of 6.75 million AES-256 keys per day, sufficient to maintain as much as 2.5 months of encrypted operations.

MAS and the banks examined superior use circumstances together with ML-DSA for digital signing, a hybrid VPN tunnel combining QKD with ML-KEM and Traditional McEliece, and large-scale file transfers utilizing one-time pad encryption.

The technical report exhibits QKD’s potential to strengthen the safety of inter-data centre hyperlinks, important cost methods and bank-to-regulator communications.

It additionally identifies challenges together with the necessity for stronger trusted node requirements, higher interoperability between QKD suppliers and sustained senior administration help to allocate funds, expertise and assets to quantum-safe initiatives.

Business individuals welcomed the findings, saying the venture clarified safety requirements, implementation challenges and the combination of quantum-safe know-how into present monetary infrastructure.

MAS will proceed collaborating with monetary establishments and know-how suppliers to develop frameworks, requirements and implementation playbooks for quantum-safe communications.

Vincent Loy, Assistant Managing Director (Expertise) and Chief Expertise Officer, MAS, mentioned,

“MAS is dedicated to collaborating with the monetary business to trial promising cybersecurity applied sciences that may assist to safeguard important monetary methods and information towards rising quantum threats. The QKD sandbox marks a big step in exploring the potential use of quantum-safe options inside IT methods and networks throughout the monetary sector.

The insights gained have enhanced our understanding of QKD know-how, helped discover attainable methods to strengthen the cyber resilience of Singapore’s monetary sector, and uplifted the capabilities of monetary establishments to reply to potential cybersecurity threats posed by quantum computing.”

Featured picture: Edited by Fintech Information Singapore, primarily based on picture by thanyakij-12 by way of Freepik