QuSecure, a provider of post-quantum cryptography (PQC) and related security offerings, has gained an important partner in its pursuit of more government business with a new agreement with Carahsoft to serve as QuSecure’s Master Government Aggregator.
The agreement is similar to many Carahsoft has forged with technology suppliers of all stripes over the last two decades as the Reston, Virginia, company has become a key aggregator for federal government agencies eyeing technology upgrades. In fact, Carahsoft has had another Master Government Aggregator agreement with another quantum-safe security specialist, Qrypt, since mid-2023, and also counts SandboxAQ, which provides PQC, quantum sensing, and other quantum solutions, as a partner. Carahsoft also partners with other security technology companies, like Entrust.
This particular deal will make products from QuSecure, a six-year-old firm based in San Mateo, California, available to the public sector through Carahsoft’s reseller partners, AWS Marketplace and NASA Solutions for Enterprise-Wide Procurement (SEWP) V, Information Technology Enterprise Solutions – Software 2 (ITES-SW2), and OMNIA Partners contracts. That should give QuSecure a profile boost at a significant time as more government agencies and departments evaluate PQC offerings based on standards published in August of last year, and pursue compliance with the US Quantum Computing Cyber Security Preparedness Act. These orgs also are looking to become more crypto-agile, or able to support and switch between multiple protection schemes as the variety of security attacks and protections needs continues to grow.
QuSecure Co-founder and CEO Rebecca Krauthamer told Fierce Electronics via e-mail, “With the broad adoption of crypto-agile post-quantum orchestration becoming a reality, the timing could not be better for a partnership with QuSecure's cutting-edge technology and Carahsoft's unmatched market reach. This technology will be foundational to the widespread deployment of next-generation zero-trust networks. Working with Carahsoft, we will be able to extend it to every endpoint in the global network.”
Carahsoft President Craig P. Abod added in a statement, “As quantum computing and AI become more prevalent in today’s digital landscape, Carahsoft and our reseller partners remain dedicated to providing best-of-breed IT solutions to our Public Sector customers. We look forward to partnering with QuSecure to help the Public Sector address the urgent need of protecting our most sensitive data assets.”
QuSecure’s QuProtect platform is designed to guide organizations, including government clients, through every stage of PQC adoption, from discovery to remediation, enabling crypto-agility and flexible administration of their cybersecurity frameworks, as well as protection from the threats that emerging quantum computers pose to current encryption techniques. The threat could be years away from attaining full strength, though Google security researchers recently said in a blog post that it could be easier than previously thought for quantum computers to achieve this capability.
The latest news comes a few months after Krauthamer told Fierce Electronics that 2025 likely would be “an inflection point” for adoption of quantum-safe security, and as Congress reportedly is planning an update to the National Quantum Initiative, which was created during the first Trump Administration. However, organizations that influence security policy like the National Institute of Standards and Technology, which oversees development of PQC standards, and the US Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Agency, more recently have faced budget cuts under the current Trump Administration.