Erica Grant holds the key to fixing a security flaw that puts thousands of hotels – and their guests – at risk each year.

It’s simple, really.

If you’re a doctoral student in quantum computing like she is.

With as much passion for security as she has for quantum computing, Grant, 24, has unlocked a way to guard doors against tech-savvy intruders.

She launched her startup, Quantum Lock, in October to push forward her vision around security and gained momentum after capturing a $10,000 grand prize at the Knoxville Entrepreneur Center’s “What’s The Big Idea?” pitch competition in March.

Her big idea sets out to fix one big problem: It’s possible – easy, even – to get an old key card from a hotel and convert it into a master key that can access any room in the building, said Grant, a Virginia native now pursuing her doctorate through the Bredesen Center for Interdisciplinary Research and Graduate Education at the University of Tennessee.

“It requires very minimal equipment and people do it,” she said.

Quantum Lock puts that threat to rest by combining the use of a smart lock, smartphone and quantum computing to open doors through a more secure process.

Out with the plastic

Some hotels are pivoting toward smartphone-based key systems, according to Grant, who pointed out that key cards waste plastic.

“That incurs cost to the hotel, but also it’s really bad for the environment,” she said, also noting that a smartphone system has the potential to reinforce hotel safety with more security measures than a keycard system would.

More:Knoxville named one of country's best maker cities. What does that mean for local makers?

What makes Quantum Lock rise above other smart lock systems that rely on smartphones?

“It generates completely random untraceable keys using quantum physics,” Grant said.

The science comes down to light particles.

Those particles are inherently random, Grant said, and her technology measures that randomness to create the keys that are used to communicate between the smart lock and the phone.

Computers can’t create random keys or random numbers but rather operate with mathematical functions to produce seemingly random sequences of numbers that people can re-create, she said.

More:TN Tech Census: Knox startups lack access to capital, senior talent

In using the random quality of light particles, Grant can generate random numbers that aren’t part of any sequence.

“You can’t re-create that in any way,” she said.

“Being able to deploy quantum physics in any form in the market today is a tremendous accomplishment,” said John Bruck, entrepreneur-in-resident at the University of Tennessee, Knoxville’s Anderson Center for Entrepreneurship & Innovation. “And Erica’s been able to take her academic competence to the development of a locking system using quantum physics as a random number generator.”

Bruck, who also serves as a strategic adviser to Grant, added, “and to be able to then apply that to a significant problem in a significant market makes the story even more exciting.”

Tying two passions into one career

For Grant, her startup fastens together her love of quantum computing with an urgency she places on improving safety, which gained momentum during her undergraduate years at Virginia Tech, where she served as president of Help Save The Next Girl.

The nonprofit student organization was founded after 20-year-old Virginia Tech student Morgan Dana Harrington was abducted and murdered in 2009, according to the organization’s website.

Grant helped facilitate self-defense seminars and social media campaigns when other people went missing and focused on raising awareness of their stories.

While she was part of Help Save The Next Girl, two other local girls went missing.

It all shaped her.

“I’ve always really cared about security,” Grant said.

Also impassioned about physics, Grant found her way to quantum computing, which was at the center of an internship she held at Oak Ridge National Laboratory.

She knew she wanted to continue on with quantum computing because “it has the potential to be extremely powerful in computer science,” she said, “but also in communication and security there are a lot of really powerful applications.”

More:Can more coworking spaces help Knoxville compete for entrepreneurs?

The concept behind her own application began to evolve while she found herself watching hours and hours of videos featuring hackers at the famous DEF CON hacking conference break into doors and smart locks and expose problems with master keys.

She was “mind-blown at how easy it was to break into things.”

“I realized immediately that we could use quantum physics to make things more secure,” Grant said, “and I realized in that moment that I wanted to make a smart lock that used quantum information.”

In pursuit of a patent

Grant is currently developing the third prototype of her smart lock, a piece of hardware that would be attached to a hotel room door and would communicate a key back and forth to a guest’s smartphone – where the Quantum Lock app would live.

The app communicates with the quantum lock, which is connected to the management system. All communication with the quantum lock is encrypted, Grant said.

The app also communicates with the hotel management system over WiFi. All the doors are connected with a WiFi hub that collects data for management to use. Blockchain is part of the management system and offers another layer of security used for authenticating who can access a door.

Data from the locks is pulled in through a hub system, extending Quantum Lock’s capabilities, potentially to monitor efficiency of staff as well as to identify when guests are in their hotel rooms so that they are not disrupted by cleaning services.

The $10,000 that Grant took home from KEC’s pitch competition will help cushion her as she builds her third prototype and will also potentially assist her with patenting.

She currently has a provisional patent and is patent pending as she tries to raise money to afford a full utility patent.

The funds add to the innovator’s winnings from two other UT startup competitions last fall.

More:Entrepreneur Center launches executive-in-residence program

Grant has garnered about $17,000 from startup competitions.

Much of her progress has resulted from her own hours and her own efforts, but her strides haven’t been made entirely solo.

The entrepreneur credits a multitude of partners for their generosity in lending support through both hardware and knowledge – including Innovative Design Inc., CodeTank Labs, LLC, Radio Systems Corporation and UT’s Anderson Center.

“I don’t know where I’d be without them,” Grant said.

Scaling up and out

The timeline ahead is a hard one to predict, but Grant is planning on completing some accelerator programs and applying for grants and is starting to have conversations with investors about her idea.

She aims to attend DEF CON in Las Vegas this August to see if hackers can detect any weaknesses with Quantum Lock and, depending on the outcome, would look to polish off any critical final touches before a soft launch at a boutique hotel in Knoxville or another city like Nashville or Asheville.

More:KEC's Jim Biggs: Why the Maker City matters

Grant would roll out her smart locks at just a couple doors and would chase a goal of adding two hotels every quarter.

In the first year, after her minimum viable product is ready by 2020, she’s determined to have at least eight hotels fully stocked with her hardware. Those would likely be smaller boutique hotels whose success might pave the way for Grant to approach larger hotel chains.

More:Knox.biz 20 Under 20 class of 2018 honored at reception

But hotels aren’t the entrepreneur’s only end game.

She has her eye on the residential market with the same sense of safety at the forefront.

“I believe in this idea because I think it’s absolutely absurd how weak security systems are now, and I’m really passionate about making things safe – and quantum hardware is really the future of security,” Grant said. “I believe that 100 percent.”