Sitehop slashes testing costs with UK quantum encryption lab

Sitehop has announced it has established a high-speed, in-house testing capability for its quantum-ready encryption hardware, supported by a government Productivity Grant from the South Yorkshire Mayoral Authority.

The Sheffield-based cybersecurity start-up aims to bring greater security and sovereignty to the UK's technology landscape by transitioning from an outsourced testing facility in France to a new UK-based setup. Sitehop has invested in a Teledyne LeCroy Xena Loki 100G traffic-generation and testing platform, supplied by Red Helix.

Faster and cheaper testing

With the new in-house facility, Sitehop reports a dramatic reduction in test time, from a previous cycle of two weeks to just one day. Outsourcing previously cost the company more than GBP £18,000 per test cycle - a cost now avoided. The company also noted the elimination of export and customs delays that were associated with overseas testing.

The grant from the South Yorkshire Mayoral Authority, valued in the five-figure GBP range, facilitated the acquisition and installation of the new equipment. This move releases capacity for Sitehop's engineering teams and is expected to improve overall productivity.

Technology capabilities

Sitehop uses the Xena Loki platform to test and validate its SAFEcore encryption hardware, which supports 835 nanoseconds latency at 100Gbps and can handle up to 4,000 concurrent encrypted sessions. The platform is designed for deployment in critical sectors such as telecoms, financial services, government, and national infrastructure.

Testing now covers dynamic encryption stress scenarios, real-time traffic shaping, RFC 2544/Y.1564 compliance, peak load conditions, burst traffic, error injection, fault recovery, and multiprotocol environments. These tests ensure the SAFEcore platform meets the demands of high-bandwidth, low-latency networks and is viable for emerging use-cases including 5G backhaul and post-quantum cryptography.

Benchmarking and validation

Sitehop's use of the Xena Loki device ensures their baseline validation complies with established benchmarks RFC 2544 and Y.1564. The company noted that its SAFEcore solution often operates beyond standard methodologies, necessitating the development of custom testing profiles and simulated threat scenarios.

"Testing in this way is a strategic enabler for us, accelerating product release cycles and reducing the risk of field failure while providing clients with higher levels of confidence during procurement," said Melissa Chambers, co-founder and CEO, Sitehop. "This is a major selling-point for enterprise and critical infrastructure environments."

Chambers further commented on the importance of UK-based capability and the company's growth: "We are incredibly proud to be at the forefront of the next generation of British tech manufacturing and believe we are part of a resurgence of innovation in the UK. We are proving that deep tech, hardware innovation and cyber resilience can thrive here. As we expand globally and target high-assurance sectors, our ability to validate performance independently and rapidly becomes a cornerstone of our growth model. The grant we received has been hugely important, enabling us to bring a critical capability in-house that has accelerated our growth momentum."

Partnership with Red Helix

Red Helix, the supplier of the Xena Loki solution, provides support to Sitehop's in-house capability. The Xena Loki platform allows for precise testing of latency, throughput, packet loss, and error handling, which provides the necessary assurance to sectors requiring secure and resilient data transmission.

Liam Jackson, Director of Technology Solutions at Red Helix, said: "We are thrilled to work with Sitehop, an exciting start-up company demonstrating that hardware-based security innovation is alive and well in the UK. Testing quantum-ready security platforms requires precise accuracy, reliability, and sustained high-speed throughput, which software-only traffic-generation tools can struggle to deliver. Sitehop understands this, and by harnessing the hardware-based Teledyne LeCroy Xena Loki platform, it hugely accelerates essential testing, gaining the speed, precision and confidence to bring its cutting-edge solutions to market faster - without impacting quality."

The SAFEcore platform is already deployed in tier 1 carrier networks across several countries. Sitehop continues to focus on UK tech sovereignty, with support and technology partnerships designed to accelerate in-house innovation and security validation for encryption solutions.