Securing Autonomous Vehicles for the Quantum Era: Threats, Quantum-Safe Solutions, and Deployment Challenges
Every time an autonomous vehicle (AV) trusts a message from another car, a traffic signal or its manufacturer's server, it is really trusting classical security mechanism (e.g., public-key cryptography), and that trust may have an expiry date. A powerful enough quantum computer could break the RSA and elliptic-curve schemes that sign vehicle-to-everything (V2X) safety messages and software updates, and weaken the symmetric keys that protect stored data. Cars sold today will likely still be on the road if that day comes, and anything an attacker records now could be decrypted later. So the real question is not whether to prepare, but how. We will walk through what quantum computing actually puts at risk in an AV, which defences look most promising (post-quantum cryptography, quantum key distribution and hybrid approaches), and why getting them into real cars is harder than it sounds. We will close with an industry example, a few open research problems and a practical roadmap for the transition.
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Moniruzzaman of Thompson River University
Securing Autonomous Vehicles for the Quantum Era: Threats, Quantum-Safe Solutions, and Deployment Challenges
Every time an autonomous vehicle (AV) trusts a message from another car, a traffic signal or its manufacturer's server, it is really trusting classical security mechanism (e.g., public-key cryptography), and that trust may have an expiry date. A powerful enough quantum computer could break the RSA and elliptic-curve schemes that sign vehicle-to-everything (V2X) safety messages and software updates, and weaken the symmetric keys that protect stored data. Cars sold today will likely still be on the road if that day comes, and anything an attacker records now could be decrypted later. So the real question is not whether to prepare, but how. We will walk through what quantum computing actually puts at risk in an AV, which defences look most promising (post-quantum cryptography, quantum key distribution and hybrid approaches), and why getting them into real cars is harder than it sounds. We will close with an industry example, a few open research problems and a practical roadmap for the transition.
Biography:
Md Moniruzzaman is an Assistant Professor in the Department of Computing Science at Thompson Rivers University in Kamloops, British Columbia, and an Adjunct Faculty member in the Department of Computer Science at Lakehead University in Ontario. He earned his Ph.D. in Electrical and Computer Engineering from Lakehead University in 2023, after completing an M.Sc. in Data Science at the University of Malaya (QS Rank 56), Malaysia, in 2018. From 2023 to 2024, he was a Postdoctoral Fellow with the Department of Electrical Engineering, École de Technologie Supérieure (ÉTS), Montreal, QC, Canada. Before joining academia, he worked in industry for several years, including as a Consultant Engineer in telecommunications network analytics. He has authored or co-authored more than 15 peer-reviewed journal articles and conference papers, and is the lead inventor on a patent application in preparation on quantum-safe autonomous vehicle navigation. His recent research interests include quantum-safe blockchain, quantum machine learning, reinforcement and federated learning, peer-to-peer energy trading, electric vehicle charging networks, and smart grid security. He received the President’s Award (Graduate) from Lakehead University and the Ontario Graduate Fellowship in 2022. He is the Chair of the Computing Science Research Committee at TRU, and has served as a Session Chair for IEEE PIMRC 2023, a Track Chair for ICCA 2026, and a Technical Program Committee Member for IEEE GLOBECOM 2026. He is a reviewer for IEEE TRANSACTIONS ON MACHINE LEARNING IN COMMUNICATIONS AND NETWORKING, IEEE TRANSACTIONS ON SMART GRID, IEEE TRANSACTIONS ON VEHICULAR TECHNOLOGY, Applied Energy, and several Springer Nature journals.
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Address:805 Tru Way, , Kamloops, British Columbia, Canada, V2C 0C8