With the digitization and networking of medical and health data, intelligent medical devices are widely used to monitor patient health status and provide personalized medical services. However, these devices involve a large amount of personal health data and must ensure data security. The data security and privacy protection in the new complex network environment has become one of the important challenges in the field of healthcare. This study aims to propose a post quantum attribute based authentication key agreement protocol applicable to intelligent healthcare, to address the security risks and risks of medical data communication under traditional cryptographic systems. This new protocol is based on attribute authentication encryption technology without certificates on the grid, which completes mutual authentication and establishes secure communication through attribute and access control policies, and can optimize the deployment of certificate system components in public key infrastructure. Meanwhile, this scheme belongs to the post quantum cryptography protocol and has the ability to resist quantum computing attacks. Based on comprehensive analysis, this scheme can achieve certain advantages in execution efficiency and security, and can provide a more reliable choice for secure communication in the field of intelligent healthcare.
With the digitization and networking of medical and health data, intelligent medical devices are widely used to monitor patient health status and provide personalized medical services. However, these devices involve a large amount of personal health data and must ensure data security. The data security and privacy protection in the new complex network environment has become one of the important challenges in the field of healthcare. This study aims to propose a post quantum attribute based authentication key agreement protocol applicable to intelligent healthcare, to address the security risks and risks of medical data communication under traditional cryptographic systems. This new protocol is based on attribute authentication encryption technology without certificates on the grid, which completes mutual authentication and establishes secure communication through attribute and access control policies, and can optimize the deployment of certificate system components in public key infrastructure. Meanwhile, this scheme belongs to the post quantum cryptography protocol and has the ability to resist quantum computing attacks. Based on comprehensive analysis, this scheme can achieve certain advantages in execution efficiency and security, and can provide a more reliable choice for secure communication in the field of intelligent healthcare.
In the field of smart healthcare, video consultation has become a key way to provide medical services for remote patients. In this process, it is essential to ensure the legal identity of both parties to the communication and to protect patient privacy data from unlawful interception and tampering. Therefore, a controlled quantum authentication confidential communication protocol is proposed by using the entanglement exchange ability and measurement correlation of Bell states. With the assistance of a trusted third party, the protocol first achieves the mutual authentication of the communication parties, so as to prevent malicious users from communicating by pretending to be medical specialists or patients. The trusted party then further assists the communicating parties in generating two implicit shared keys, which they use to encrypt the message and its digest, ensuring that the patient's sensitive data is not intercepted or tampered with. In addition, the quantum sequences are transmitted only once in the channel, reducing the loss and noise effects caused by multiple transmissions. Security analysis shows that the protocol can effectively resist participant attacks and outside attacks. In addition, performance analysis provides computation in terms of qubit efficiency and experimental simulation results of the protocol.
With the progress of quantum computing, medical institutions that use classical public-key cryptography to secure the confidentiality of long-lasting and delicate healthcare information are facing great security challenges.This research aims to suggest a policy framework for Post-Quantum Cryptographic Policy (PQCP) to facilitate systematic shift of healthcare infrastructures to quantum resistant infrastructure security.It seamlessly combines cryptographic asset discovery, quantum-risk assessment, asset prioritization, cryptoagility, hybrid cryptographic migration, secure key management, governance, compliance monitoring, and ongoing security evaluation.It covers electronic health records, healthcare platforms in the cloud, medical imaging, telemedicine applications and resource-limited Internet of Medical Things devices.A risk-oriented migration strategy gives institutions the ability to prioritize systems based on the amount of data in a system, the vulnerabilities of the cryptographic functions used, the clinical criticality of the system, and the length of time the information must be kept confidential.There are hybrid (classical and post-quantum) mechanisms for gradual migration and interoperability or clinical continuity.Finally, the suggested framework offers a structured approach to enhance the preparedness of healthcare institutions, adherence to regulations, resilience against cryptographic attacks, and long-term protection of healthcare information from the evolving quantum cybersecurity landscape.
Quantum computers are capable of solving problems that classical computers cannot, particularly in the realm of cryptographic algorithms such as RSA, DSA, and ECC. Post quantum cryptography refers classical cryptographic algorithm that are designed to secure sensitive data. This research explores the application of post-quantum cryptographic techniques in healthcare systems, with a specific focus on integrating Quantum Key Distribution (QKD) with Genetic Algorithms (GA) for enhanced key optimization. As quantum computing advances, traditional cryptographic systems employed in health care are more and more vulnerable to being broken. Security of sensitive patient information—like electronic health records (EHRs), diagnostic data, and personally identifiable information— requires strong solutions that can handle future quantum attacks. Post-quantum cryptography (PQC) provides a hopeful way forward by employing quantum computer-resistant algorithms. This paper investigates the deployment of PQC methods—e.g., lattice-based, hash-based, and multivariate polynomial cryptography—inside healthcare systems to improve data confidentiality, integrity, and availability. It assesses the weaknesses of present encryption technologies and introduces PQC as a necessary update to protect patient information from sophisticated cyberattacks. The study also addresses the interoperability, computational overhead, and infrastructure readiness challenges of implementing PQC in healthcare. By implementing quantum-resilient cryptographic protocols, healthcare facilities are able to future-proof data protection practices and guarantee the safeguarding of patient data in an era governed by quantum computing.
In an Internet of Things (IoT)-based healthcare system, medical IoT devices gather and transmit critical patient data. Ensuring the security and privacy of medical data is paramount. One of the most critical challenges in this regard is the authentication of participating entities. The literature proposes specific authentication approaches for healthcare systems based on integer factorization and discrete logarithm problems. However, the advent of quantum computers would fundamentally break all of these protocols. In this study, we conducted an analysis of a recently proposed authentication and access control scheme for e-health systems, which is based on lattice-based cryptography and was developed by Gupta et al. Our analysis revealed that the scheme is vulnerable to several types of attacks, including impersonation, de-synchronization, and smart card stolen attacks, which could compromise the confidentiality and integrity of sensitive medical data. To address these security challenges, we propose an alternative authentication and access control scheme that uses Saber, a finalist lattice-based key encapsulation algorithm from round three of the NIST post-quantum cryptography standardization. One of the biggest advantages of Saber is its simplicity and efficiency. Our proposed scheme is designed specifically for e-health systems and provides robust protection against the vulnerabilities identified in Gupta et al.’s scheme. We believe that our proposed scheme represents a significant improvement over existing approaches and could help to enhance the security and privacy of e-health systems. Upon completion of our improved protocol, we proceeded to implement it within the Vivado 2018.3 environment for Zynq UltraScale FPGAs. To gather insight into its performance, we conducted a performance comparison study with various related protocols.
The healthcare sector increasingly relies on Cyber-Physical Systems (CPS) that integrate medical devices, networks, and digital records to deliver critical patient care. Protecting sensitive medical data within these interconnected systems is vital due to potential privacy violations and safety risks. The initiation of quantum computing poses substantial threats to traditional cryptographic algorithms, which underpin current healthcare data security. This article examines the deployment of quantum-safe cryptographic algorithms considered to resist quantum attacks, enabling robust protection of healthcare CPS. It highlights advanced encryption methods including lattice-based, hash-based, and code-based post-quantum schemes, alongside quantum key distribution (QKD) for secure key management. The discussion includes challenges related to healthcare-specific system constraints, regulatory compliance, and integration complexity. Through adopting quantum-resistant cryptography and comprehensive key management protocols, healthcare organizations can safeguard electronic health records (EHRs), device communication, and patient data against incipient post-quantum threats, ensuring long-term data confidentiality, integrity, and system resilience.
To meet the requirement of doctors’ comprehensive diagnosis and treatment across multiple servers in smart healthcare, and to address the lack of efficient switching mechanisms in existing post-quantum authentication schemes, a post-quantum password authentication and fast-switching key agreement protocol for multi-server smart healthcare environments was proposed. With ML-KEM as the core cryptographic primitive, a mechanism combining initial authentication and fast switching authentication was designed. In the initial authentication phase, full authentication was performed, and a master session key and a service session key were established. During multi-server access, fast switching authentication was performed, and a new service session key was independently negotiated with the target server. In terms of security, the session key semantic security of the proposed protocol was proved under the ROR model, and resistance to common attacks was analyzed. In terms of performance, when a user continuously accessed five servers, compared with the repeated full-authentication approach in Wen’s and Chen’s post-quantum schemes, the proposed protocol reduced the cumulative computational overhead by more than 70.34% and the cumulative communication overhead by more than 27.53%. The performance gap increases as the number of servers grows, which shows that the proposed protocol has significant efficiency advantages and good scalability in large-scale deployment scenarios.