We take on the Quan­tum Inter­net simul­ta­ne­ous­ly in five nodes across Europe on 5–6 Novem­ber 2019. Join us in Delft, Dublin, Pad­ua, Paris or Sara­je­vo!

How this Hackathon Works

For the first time ever, we are hold­ing the hackathon simul­ta­ne­ous­ly in five con­nect­ed loca­tions or ‘nodes’ across Europe. Par­tic­i­pants from across all five loca­tions will form teams to take on chal­lenges, and pos­si­bly even form cross-node teams. And of course, we will bring all our nodes togeth­er vir­tu­al­ly to share projects, progress and feed­back. Experts and jury mem­bers will also be at hand to guide par­tic­i­pants.

Apply now take part in the Pan-Euro­pean Quan­tum Inter­net Hackathon 2019

The Hackathon Challenge

The goal of this hackathon is to devel­op some of the first appli­ca­tions that use quan­tum mechan­ics to secure their online com­mu­ni­ca­tions. An exam­ple of such an appli­ca­tion is a brows­er that can load a web page over an encrypt­ed HTTPS con­nec­tion using a secret key gen­er­at­ed by a quan­tum key dis­tri­b­u­tion (QKD) pro­to­col. Sim­i­lar­ly, many oth­er appli­ca­tions that need to encrypt their online traf­fic, such as e‑mail or online mes­sag­ing, can be inte­grat­ed with QKD. One could even extend OpenSSL to pro­vide a QKD API to make it eas­i­er to inte­grate for future appli­ca­tions. Whilst a quan­tum net­work is not yet avail­able, a sim­u­lat­ed ver­sion that con­nects all the par­tic­i­pat­ing nodes will be pro­vid­ed. The sim­u­lat­ed net­work will expose the same API that will be used in the first demon­stra­tion net­work in the Nether­lands and so all appli­ca­tions devel­oped at this hackathon will be runnable on real hard­ware as soon as it becomes avail­able.

We’re Looking for You!

Curi­ous about the Quan­tum Inter­net? Pas­sion­ate about devel­op­ing new tech­nol­o­gy? We’re look­ing for soft­ware devel­op­ers, net­work oper­a­tors and equip­ment ven­dors, as well as gen­er­al web, pri­va­cy, and cryp­tog­ra­phy enthu­si­asts (stu­dents, researchers, indus­try pro­fes­sion­als) who are inter­est­ed in Quan­tum Inter­net tech­nol­o­gy to par­tic­i­pate in this pan-Euro­pean event. Each node can accept approx­i­mate­ly 20 par­tic­i­pants based on their capac­i­ty, which means we have rough­ly 100 places avail­able in total across our five nodes.

If you’re inter­est­ed, sub­mit the appli­ca­tion form before the dead­line, and make sure to select the node of your choice.

Curious about the Quantum Internet?

Read about the Quan­tum Inter­net Hackathon held in Ams­ter­dam last year.

Further details

More about the event can be found at https://labs.ripe.net/Members/ulka_athale_1/take-part-in-pan-european-quantum-internet-hackathon