UBITECH and QUBITECH, its subsidiary dedicated to quantum technologies, took part in the kick-off meeting of QCERT, the new Digital Europe Programme project on Quantum safe CERTificate Infrastructure for Resilient Trust, held in Athens on 29–30 September 2026 and hosted by the project coordinator UniSystems. Co-funded by the European Union under Grant Agreement No. 101299572, QCERT runs for 36 months, from September 2026 to August 2029, and brings together twelve organisations from across Europe to prepare the continent’s digital trust infrastructure for the post-quantum era. The two-day meeting set the project’s technical baseline, work plan and governance, and gave the consortium’s trust service providers, certification authorities, regulators, research institutes and technology companies a first opportunity to align on how Europe’s public key infrastructure (PKI) should evolve once cryptographically relevant quantum computers make today’s RSA- and ECC-based certificates obsolete.
A quantum-resilient certificate infrastructure for Europe
Digital certificates underpin virtually every secure interaction in Europe’s economy, from web browsing and online banking to electronic identity, qualified signatures and machine-to-machine communication. All of them rely on public-key algorithms that a sufficiently powerful quantum computer will break. QCERT responds to this urgent need by designing and deploying a quantum-resilient certificate infrastructure that safeguards Europe’s digital trust ecosystem in the post-quantum era.
The project will deliver a next-generation PKI framework that integrates post-quantum cryptographic (PQC) primitives, aligned with the standards of NIST and ETSI, into existing trust and identity infrastructures. It will develop hybrid certificate models that combine classical and post-quantum algorithms, together with Merkle-tree-based certificate validation mechanisms that enable scalable, verifiable and privacy-preserving trust chains. QCERT will further extend TLS and certificate management protocols to support PQC-based key exchange and signature algorithms, ensuring end-to-end interoperability and compliance with eIDAS 2.0, NIS2 and the EU Cybersecurity Act. Beyond technology, QCERT drives policy, standardisation and adoption. Working with European qualified trust service providers (QTSPs), certification authorities, regulators and industry stakeholders, the project will define migration roadmaps for critical sectors such as finance, government and digital identity, fostering Europe’s strategic autonomy and resilience against quantum-enabled cyber threats.
The QCERT consortium is coordinated by Uni Systems with UBITECH as technical lead, and includes QUBITECH, DPG Digital Media, InQbit Innovations, the Hellenic Cybersecurity Institute, Austria Card, the National Cybersecurity Authority of Greece, InfoCert, Adacom, the University of Piraeus Research Center and IMDEA Networks Institute.
UBITECH: from PQC-aware TLS to sector-specific testbeds
UBITECH’s technical contribution to QCERT is delivered by its Secure Systems & Trusted Computing (SST) Research Group, led by Dr Thanassis Giannetsos, which brings to the project a long track record in trusted computing, attestation, zero-trust architectures and secure communications from a portfolio of European cybersecurity research initiatives. Within QCERT, UBITECH will define best practices and migration strategies for integrating PQC-aware TLS into real-world infrastructures, bridging the gap between standardised post-quantum primitives and the operational realities of production networks. It will validate the interoperability of the project’s Hybrid Certificates and Merkle Certificate Engine in demonstrator use cases, ensuring that the new trust chains work seamlessly alongside existing deployments. UBITECH will also define the project’s pilot use cases and prepare the sector-specific testbeds in which QCERT technologies will be validated. Deployment requirements will be refined in close collaboration with the consortium’s end-users, and baseline metrics will be established so that the performance, scalability and security gains of the quantum-safe infrastructure can be measured against today’s classical PKI.
QUBITECH: leading the PQC and hybrid key exchange implementation
QUBITECH’s contribution is handled by its partner Dr Simos Tsintzos, Technology Director of QUBITECH, whose team works at the intersection of quantum technologies, post-quantum cryptography and hardware security. QUBITECH leads the PQC and Hybrid Key Exchange Implementation in QCERT. The team will extend handshake protocols to support post-quantum key encapsulation mechanisms (KEMs) such as ML-KEM, as well as hybrid key exchanges that combine classical elliptic-curve Diffie-Hellman (for example X25519) with PQC, so that connections remain secure even if one of the two components is eventually broken. QUBITECH will produce reference implementations and test their integration in widely used TLS stacks, including OpenSSL and rustls. QUBITECH will further deliver the APIs and libraries that allow existing applications, from servers and clients to resource-constrained IoT devices, to validate hybrid and Merkle-based certificates. These integrations will be tested with major cryptographic libraries, including OpenSSL, rustls and NSS, and with web browsers where possible, giving the wider ecosystem a practical, open path towards quantum-safe trust.
Statements
“The transition to post-quantum cryptography is not a distant research question; it is a migration that Europe’s trust service providers, banks and public administrations need to start planning today,” said Dr Simos Tsintzos, Technology Director and co-founder of QUBITECH. “QCERT gives us the opportunity to combine UBITECH’s experience in trusted computing and secure systems integration with QUBITECH’s deep expertise in quantum and post-quantum technologies, and to turn standardised PQC primitives into a certificate infrastructure that real organisations can deploy. Being the technical lead of a Digital Europe project of this strategic importance is a strong recognition of the group’s investment in cybersecurity research over the past two decades.”
“Hybrid certificates and PQC-aware TLS only deliver value if they interoperate with the infrastructures organisations already run,” added Dr Thanassis Giannetsos, Head of the Secure Systems & Trusted Computing Research Group at UBITECH. “Our focus in QCERT is on exactly that bridge: migration strategies, demonstrator use cases and sector-specific testbeds that show, with measurable baselines, how quantum-safe trust chains behave in finance, government and digital identity settings.”
About QCERT
QCERT, Quantum safe CERTificate Infrastructure for Resilient Trust, is co-funded by the European Union under the Digital Europe Programme and the European Cybersecurity Competence Centre (Grant Agreement No. 101299572). The project started in September 2026 and will run for 36 months, until August 2029. It is coordinated by Uni Systems and brings together twelve organisations from Luxembourg, Greece, Cyprus, Romania, Austria, Italy and Spain.
