On August 14, 2024, the 17th National College Student Information Security Contest Finals successfully concluded at the Taicang Smart Port Campus of Northwestern Polytechnical University. The team of undergraduate students from our laboratory won the second prize with their project “IPSec VPN Data Security Transmission Platform Integrated with Quantum Key”, supervised by Associate Researcher Jian Li.

The project aims to integrate quantum key into the traditional IPSec protocol, achieving quantum-resistant security features while maintaining compatibility. To address high-security demands from users, the team introducs the One-Time Pad algorithm. To solve the efficiency issue caused by the low key supply rate in the One-Time Pad mode, the team designs a dynamic key update algorithm to balance security and transmission efficiency. Additionally, to tackle the problems of decreased long-term storage security and difficult key synchronization, the team incorporats a key management mechanism to securely store and synchronize keys generated by QKD (Quantum Key Distribution). Through these designs, the team builds an IPSec VPN data security transmission platform integrated with quantum keys, based on actual QKD devices, and developed a GUI for user convenience.

The 17th National College Student Information Security Contest was hosted by the Ministry of Education’s Teaching Steering Committee for Cyberspace Security and organized by Northwestern Polytechnical University. The competition attracted 3,598 students from 229 universities nationwide, submitting a total of 1,023 projects. Among them, 359 teams from 117 universities successfully advanced to the finals.