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UNB Researchers Build a Practical Roadmap for the Post-Quantum Migration

A Canadian Institute for Cybersecurity poster uses real TLS traffic data and system dependency maps to turn cryptographic discovery into a staged post-quantum migration plan.

A scanned server rack beside a migration roadmap whose four milestones each carry a green quantum-safe lock, labelled end state: quantum-safe

Quantum computers powerful enough to break today's public-key cryptography are no longer a distant hypothetical — they're a migration deadline. The hard part isn't the new math; it's knowing what to migrate, in what order, without breaking the systems people depend on.

A poster from UNB's Canadian Institute for Cybersecurity tackles that logistics problem directly. From Cryptographic Discovery to a Post-Quantum Migration Roadmap, by Amir Hassanpour Zarghani, Vikas Chouhan, and Ali A. Ghorbani — the institute's founding director and Order of New Brunswick recipient — will appear at the PST Cybersecurity Summit 2026 in Fredericton on Aug. 20.

The problem: cryptography is everywhere, and invisible

Organizations rarely know how many places RSA and ECC hide — TLS certificates, VPNs, code signing, firmware updates, hardware tokens. The researchers start from a "cryptographic discovery" pass: they analyze TLS data and system dependencies to inventory what actually uses vulnerable crypto and how the pieces depend on each other.

The approach: risk-ranked migration

From that inventory, the team assesses risk and produces a practical, staged migration roadmap — which systems to move first, which dependencies block others, and how to sequence the work so critical services keep running while keys and certificates are swapped for post-quantum algorithms.

That's the difference between the poster's framing and a research toy: discovery grounded in real traffic data, feeding a plan a CISO could actually execute.

Why it matters

Post-quantum standards are already landing, and mandates are following. New Brunswick firms holding government and defence contracts — and the province's cybersecurity cluster that serves them — will need exactly this kind of migration know-how long before the quantum deadline bites. Research like this is how the province keeps its edge as the crypto era turns over.

Sources

ChronologyCIC· 11 stories since Aug 4, 2026

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Chronology · show all 11 stories
  1. UNB Researchers Build a Practical Roadmap for the Post-Quantum Migration (this story)
  2. UNB Poster Weighs the Privacy Cost of Federated-Learning Aggregation
  3. UNB Researchers Deploy Collaborative AI Agents to Guard Power-Substation Networks
  4. UNB Researchers Build a Mixture-of-Experts Defence Against Adversarial AI Attacks
  5. UNB Researchers Make AI Malware Detection Explainable with a 'Dual Prototype' Framework
  6. UNB Researcher Takes a Geometric Axe to Optimization's Symmetry Problem
  7. UNB Researcher's 'Trust Passport' Would Stamp Every AI Reply with Its Risk Profile
  8. National Cyber Agencies and Big Banks Head to Fredericton for UNB's Cybersecurity Summit
  9. Cybersecurity Pioneer Ali Ghorbani Named to the Order of New Brunswick

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