Sitehop slashes costs with high-speed in-house encryption testing

Sitehop has partnered with testing specialist Red Helix to bring high-speed product testing in-house for its hardware-based encryption solutions tailored to critical sectors.

The Sheffield-headquartered cybersecurity company has acquired a Teledyne LeCroy Xena testing platform from Red Helix, supported by a grant from the South Yorkshire Mayoral Authority. The investment is aimed at enabling Sitehop to test and validate its ultra-low latency SAFEcore encryption platform on-site, a departure from its previous reliance on external facilities overseas.

Testing shift

Previously, Sitehop's product testing was carried out at an outsourced facility in France, involving substantial turnaround times and cost. With the latest set-up, testing cycles have been reduced from two weeks to a single day, while costs associated with customs and transport - previously exceeding GBP £18,000 per cycle - have been eliminated. The move is expected to enhance productivity by allowing Sitehop's engineering team to focus on other development tasks.

The Teledyne LeCroy Xena Loki 100G platform, now installed at Sitehop, enables bi-directional testing of sub-microsecond latency in 100Gbps network environments, allowing rigorous examination of the Sitehop SAFEcore platform under a range of performance and reliability scenarios relevant to sectors including telecoms, finance, government and national infrastructure.

Broader validation

Using the Xena Loki device, Sitehop can benchmark its SAFEcore encryption technology - which is capable of 835 nanosecond latency at 100Gbps speeds - across parameters such as throughput, packet loss, and overall error handling. The platform supports up to 4,000 concurrent connections and is designed to enable crypto-agile encryption for use cases ranging from 5G backhaul to evolving post-quantum security demands.

Routine tests include peak load simulations, stress testing in mixed protocol environments, error injection and fault recovery, as well as real-time encrypted traffic benchmarks. The company conducts both standard and custom test profiles, with the latter addressing simulated threat scenarios and dynamic key exchange processes.

Industry context

The introduction of on-site high-speed testing is intended to provide more accurate and timely benchmarking of encrypted traffic flow, while reducing the time and resource barriers linked to product validation. These changes are seen as strengthening Sitehop's proposition to customers in sectors requiring high assurance and resilience.

"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 broader implications of this shift for Sitehop's strategy and the UK technology manufacturing landscape. "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."

Validation and resilience

The baseline validation tests undertaken by Sitehop with the Xena Loki device conform to widely-adopted industry benchmarks such as RFC 2544 and Y.1564. However, the company noted that the SAFEcore platform often performs beyond what traditional methodologies can measure, necessitating the creation of custom profiles for simulated attack and dynamic encryption scenarios.

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 new on-site capacity is positioned as integral to Sitehop's plans to serve high-assurance markets globally, as well as to respond to upcoming requirements in post-quantum cryptography and broader digital infrastructure security.