Charles Lyons-Burt 
SandboxAQ has entered a five-year agreement with the Department of War Office of the Chief Information Officer to help the department identify and assess cryptographic assets across its networks. The work will use the company’s AQtive Guard platform to support a coordinated shift to post-quantum cryptography, SandboxAQ said Wednesday.
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What Is the DOW CIO Seeking From SandboxAQ?
AQtive Guard will automate cryptographic discovery and inventory activities, giving the CIO’s office and other DOW components a clearer view of algorithms, keys, dependencies and vulnerabilities that may require modernization ahead of quantum-enabled threats. The work follows earlier demonstration efforts with the Defense Information Systems Agency’s Emerging Technology organization through its QRC PKI program, which evaluated quantum-resistant cryptography approaches.
SandboxAQ CEO Jack Hidary said in the announcement that the department is seeking to strengthen its readiness as adversarial cyber capabilities advance and as the long-term risk to classical encryption becomes more acute.
Why Is DOW Prioritizing Post-Quantum Cryptography?
Analysts and federal cybersecurity officials have warned that sufficiently mature quantum computing could undermine today’s widely deployed public-key cryptographic systems. Gartner has projected that classical encryption methods could be at risk by 2029, prompting agencies to assess cryptographic baselines and plan phased migrations.
For the DOW, discovery and inventory are prerequisites for replacement. As artificial intelligence adoption expands and operational systems grow more interconnected, leaders have emphasized the need for continuous visibility into cryptographic usage across platforms and machine identities.
What Other Recent DoW Collaborations Has SandboxAQ Pursued?
The CIO partnership follows several other programs within the defense enterprise that SandboxAQ has engaged this year.
One effort, announced Nov. 18, brought the company into the Defense Innovation Unit’s Transition of Quantum Sensing program to advance magnetic anomaly navigation for autonomous systems. DIU is evaluating SandboxAQ’s AQNav software in GPS-denied environments as part of its push to strengthen Positioning, Navigation, and Timing resilience.
In October, SandboxAQ and the Army concluded a full-scale calendar-aging campaign focused on improving lithium-ion battery health forecasting using AI-driven large quantitative models. The effort, conducted with the Army Combat Capabilities Development Command’s C5ISR Center, produced a broad dataset to refine predictions of battery capacity fade, charge retention, and remaining useful life under various storage and operational conditions.
Together with the new CIO contract, these initiatives reflect SandboxAQ’s widening role across defense modernization areas spanning cybersecurity, navigation resilience and mission-critical energy systems.
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