PQ-NEXT Core with Danai Theochari, Motor Oil Hellas

What drives PQ-NEXT from within? PQ-NEXT Core reveals the minds and teams behind the project. By showcasing the perspectives, insights, and ambitions of those leading its key areas, we uncover the vision and collaboration that shape PQ-NEXT’s vision.

Let’s start by getting to know Danai Theochari, Motor Oil Hellas, a little better and by introducing the team that will work on the project.

My name is Danai Theochari, and I am a Cybersecurity Expert at Motor Oil Hellas (MOH). I represent the Cybersecurity department in PQ-NEXT, where MOH serves as the owner of Pilot 3. My background is in incident response, penetration testing, cyber defence and resilience, with more than 6 years of experience protecting the kind of OT and IT environments that underpin energy operations. Motor Oil is a diversified, integrated energy provider in Southeastern Europe: we operate one of the most complex refineries in Europe and rank among the leading suppliers of electricity, energy-efficiency and electromobility services in Greece.

The journey to PQ-NEXT began from a simple operational concern: the cryptography that protects our critical communications today will not withstand a future quantum computer, yet our assets and the data they exchange have very long lifetimes. Joining the consortium gave us the opportunity to confront that risk early and in a controlled way, and to make sure the post-quantum transition is shaped around the realities of an industrial operator rather than only in the laboratory.

The Motor Oil team working on PQ-NEXT is deliberately multidisciplinary, bringing together the competencies needed to validate post-quantum cryptography in a live industrial setting:

• OT and automation engineers, who understand the SCADA, PLC and field-device environment that the pilot reproduces;
• IT and network-security specialists, responsible for the digital twin, the VPN and the integration of post-quantum and hybrid cryptography;
• compliance and risk colleagues, who connect the technical work to our regulatory obligations under NIS2 and the GDPR.

Within the project, this team works closely with our Pilot 3 contributors, the coordinator NCSR Demokritos, together with INDRA Sistemas de Comunicaciones Seguras (ISCS), Telefónica Innovación Digital (TID) and AFCEA.

What problem does your role in the project address in simple terms, and why is it critical for the project’s implementation?

In simple terms, my role makes the project real. As the industrial end-user and leader of Pilot 3, Motor Oil contributes to the operational environment, the requirements and the validation that turn post-quantum cryptography from a promising idea into something an energy operator can actually deploy. The problem we address is that critical-infrastructure operators cannot experiment with new cryptography on live systems, availability and safety come first, so there has been no safe, representative place to find out what hybrid post-quantum protection really costs in latency, scalability and energy.

This is critical for PQ-NEXT’s implementation because the project’s credibility depends on evidence from a realistic setting. By building a digital twin of our own infrastructure, we let the consortium test, measure and refine its tools against genuine industrial constraints without ever touching production. Our role also anchors the work in the regulatory reality of the sector, NIS2 and the GDPR, so that the results are not only technically sound but defensible for operators who have to justify every change.

What are the main activities, tasks, and objectives of your work and your work in PQ-NEXT?

Our overall objective is to demonstrate that post-quantum cryptography can secure operational technology, smart metering and energy-network components against future quantum-enabled threats without unacceptable operational impact. Concretely, Motor Oil’s work spans several work packages:

• Leading the Critical Infrastructure Pilot (WP4, M8–M36): designing and building the digital twin, integrating PQC algorithms (Kyber, Dilithium), measuring latency and energy KPIs, validating performance and reporting results in the context of Pilot 3.
• Pilot integration and planning (WP4, M4–M10): defining pilot 3 requirements, KPIs and integration support so that our activities align with the overall WP4 validation and demonstration plan.
• Feedback on migration tools and benchmarking (WP2 & WP3, M6–M24): providing industrial validation and feedback for hybrid deployment and crypto-agility optimisation.
• Compliance and risk input (WP5, M10–M30): supplying GDPR and NIS2 insights to the legal-navigator and risk-management framework.
• Dissemination and standardisation (WP6, M18–M36): sharing pilot outputs and best practices with the wider community and standardisation activities.

Moving on, a personal note. What is the main outcome you personally hope this project will achieve?

On a personal level, what I most hope this project achieves is to turn the quantum threat from an abstract worry into a manageable engineering decision for operators like us. If, by the end of PQ-NEXT, a critical-infrastructure operator can look at our pilot and see a credible, evidence-based path for adopting hybrid post-quantum protection in stages, with real numbers on latency, scalability and energy, and a clear way to stay compliant, then we will have removed a great deal of the uncertainty that holds the sector back today. I would like the digital-twin approach we are validating to become a trusted, repeatable way to de-risk this transition, so that protecting essential energy services for the long term becomes a matter of routine good practice rather than a leap of faith.

Looking ahead, what excites you most about the post-quantum era?

What excites me most is crypto-agility, the shift from cryptography as a fixed, one-off choice to something we can adapt as the threat landscape and the standards evolve. For an energy operator that is genuinely empowering: instead of reacting to each new risk, we can design resilience into our communications from the outset and update it with confidence. I am also drawn to the idea that security and sustainability can advance together. PQ-NEXT explicitly measures energy impact, which matters a great deal to us as an energy company. More broadly, the post-quantum era is a chance for industrial operators to move from the back foot to being proactive, protecting the essential services that society depends on well before the threat fully materialises.