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The Australian startup using quantum physics to catch cyber attackers in the act

UNSW Institute for Cyber Security

Quantum Lock uses technology famously distrusted by Albert Einstein to build powerful infrastructure security protocols.

When Russian forces compromised the systems controlling Ukraine's power generators, or when a US satellite was recently bricked by a hacked modem, the damage wasn't just technical – it was strategic. 

For UNSW researcher-turned-founder Dr Jesse Laeuchli, these incidents expose a blind spot in how we secure critical infrastructure. 

“We've seen recently that nation states are able to compromise these embedded devices and cause tremendous economic and strategic harm,” Dr Laeuchli says. 

“The computers running power stations, data centres, drones and satellites are all vulnerable. There's no way to be sure that those devices haven't been hacked.”

That's what Dr Laeuchli's startup, Quantum Lock, is built to fix. Rather than defending devices from attack, the technology uses quantum mechanics to prove, with certainty, whether a device has been compromised – turning an exercise in probability into one of verification.

Dr Laeuchli said the technology provided continuous monitoring, so you know in real time when the attack happens.

He said this was crucial, as the initial compromise itself isn’t the end goal of most attackers. They want to move through network, so by finding the initial breach, Quantum Lock is preventing intended damage.

“We’re using quantum mechanics to securely communicate information in a way that you can’t do with classical communications.”

The team recently secured $1.2m in Australian venture capital funding to enable commercialisation of the product.

How it works 

At the heart of Quantum Lock is quantum entanglement – the phenomenon Albert Einstein famously distrusted, once dubbing it “spooky action at a distance”.

Two entangled particles remain linked regardless of the distance between them: measuring one instantly affects the other. Physicists still don't fully understand why entanglement works, but Quantum Lock has engineered it into practical use: a “quantum teleporter” capable of transmitting a quantum state between two points through a channel no adversary can secretly intercept or spoof. 

“A quantum teleporter is something where if you share these entangled particles, you can get a quantum state instantly from one spot to another,” Dr Laeuchli says.

“So an adversary can’t interact with that communication channel, and if you’ve got this quantum teleporter, you can’t give it away. We know who we’re talking to, and we’ve got this communication channel that an attacker can’t interact with. 

“If you have those two things, you can build really powerful security protocols.”

Because the communication channel can't be forged, Quantum Lock's system can verify the trustworthiness of embedded devices – immediately confirming whether a piece of infrastructure is what it claims to be, or whether it has been compromised. 

Why entanglement behaves this way remains one of physics' great questions. 

“You have these two particles, and in our case, those are photons, and you distribute them,” he says. 

"You can distribute them by satellite or fibre optic, but the thing about how these two photons communicate with each other, how the entanglement works, people don’t know. There’s many interpretations of quantum mechanics.”

Dr Laeuchli points to two of the most popular explanations: the “many-worlds” interpretation, where every quantum measurement splits reality into different universes, one for each possible outcome, and the “retro-casual” theory, where entangled particles are thought to communicate backwards in time. 

“That sort of raises more questions than it answers, right? Like, how do they do that?” he asks. 

“People don't know how entanglement works, but they do know that you can engineer it, you can make it happen.

“It's a fascinating concept and you can use it to do all kinds of things. People use it to do computation, people use it to do cryptography, and now we're using it to do this new approach of detecting when things are attacked.”

From the lab to defence contender

After completing his PhD in particle physics simulations at the College of William and Mary in the United States, Dr Laeuchli spent five years working in US government roles, including the National Security Agency.

After a stint at the CIA, he moved to Australia to take up a role at Deakin University before relocating to UNSW Canberra. After 12 months in the capital, he transferred to UNSW Sydney, where he is a member of the UNSW Institute for Cyber Security and teaches Network Defence and Introduction to Programming within the School of Computer Science and Engineering.

“A lot of people who understand quantum don't understand cyber security, and a lot of people who understand cyber security don't understand quantum,” he says.

The technology is gaining traction. Quantum Lock has secured funding through Defence Trailblazer and Quantum Australia, and he has held early discussions with Amazon Web Services and JP Morgan about securing data centre infrastructure and financial systems. 

Dr Laeuchli says the team is “very close to deploying in the real world”.

There are also plans to expand the lab at UNSW Sydney to speed up engineering. Quantum Lock is a UNSW project at its core: Dr Laeuchli is joined by UNSW alumni Gary Zamel as executive chairman, while UNSW alumni Kieran Singh (commercial manager) and fellow IFCyber member Arash Shaghaghi (engineering lead) join Dr Laeuchli on the management team. 

Dr Laeuchli says the appeal goes beyond the physics. 

“I think this has the potential to be a success story for Australia,” he says – that a homegrown quantum breakthrough can translate into genuine defence and cybersecurity capability.

“I've always believed in the technology, but there’s a gap from being a good technology to being a good business, and that was the point where I thought, 'oh, this could succeed as a business and not just as a research thing'.”

Trials are planned in the United States later this year, alongside a US capital raise, and the company will present at a Quantum Australia showcase in Canberra this month.

Contact details:

For media enquiries about this story and interview requests, please contact Kyle Mackey-Laws, Media Officer, UNSW Institute for Cyber Security.

Email: [email protected]