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

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

• Canadian Institute for Cybersecurity: Research Spotlight post — project summary, authors, and the TLS-data approach