The kick-off meeting took place at the premises of the KIOS Centre of Excellence, marking the beginning of a collaborative effort to design and implement a unified framework for Post-Quantum Cryptography (PQC) in networked edge computing environments -- a crucial step towards strengthening Europe's cybersecurity in the quantum era.
"FOCAL will be the first European initiative to enable critical sectors -- such as medical technology, satellite communications, telecommunications, and cloud data centres -- to achieve genuine resilience against both classical and quantum attacks. It offers a unified and practical solution for post-quantum cryptography, even in resource-constrained systems (such as sensors) that play a vital role in infrastructures used daily by European citizens. It is an honour for the University of Cyprus and the KIOS Centre of Excellence to coordinate this project, which was selected through a highly competitive process -- with only 3 of the 62 submitted proposals receiving funding."