As the healthcare sector transitions to the Internet of Medical Things (IoMT), it promises significant improvements in productivity by streamlining processes, reducing administrative burdens, and automating routine tasks. However, the current authentication methods are vulnerable due to reliance on simple passwords and a lack of additional protective layers, posing a heightened risk of data breaches. Given the significant value of medical data, security measures for medical devices remain inadequate, especially in safeguarding user and device identities against future quantum computing threats. This paper proposes an enhanced authentication protocol aimed at ensuring the confidentiality and integrity of medical data. The protocol validates user and device identities while incorporating post-quantum cryptography to address upcoming challenges posed by quantum technology.
As the healthcare sector transitions to the Internet of Medical Things (IoMT), it promises significant improvements in productivity by streamlining processes, reducing administrative burdens, and automating routine tasks. However, the current authentication methods are vulnerable due to reliance on simple passwords and a lack of additional protective layers, posing a heightened risk of data breaches. Given the significant value of medical data, security measures for medical devices remain inadequate, especially in safeguarding user and device identities against future quantum computing threats. This paper proposes an enhanced authentication protocol aimed at ensuring the confidentiality and integrity of medical data. The protocol validates user and device identities while incorporating post-quantum cryptography to address upcoming challenges posed by quantum technology.
The Internet of Medical Things (IoMT) is a compelling networking paradigm integrating wireless communications sensors, connected devices, and embedded computing technologies. The IoMT involves the collection of real-time health data using sophisticated medical sensors. In recent years, the IoMT has become increasingly significant within the broader context of the Internet of Things (IoT). It provides accessibility for health monitoring and poses security obstacles to safeguarding the confidentiality and privacy of patient data. Therefore, this article presents a blockchain-integrated quantum authentication scheme in sensor-assisted IoMT networks. The proposed concept utilizes blockchain technology to achieve efficient patient authentication without the need for third-party entities. In addition, a secure quantum authentication scheme is designed not to require patients to authenticate themselves when communicating with multiple doctors simultaneously. This protocol explicitly addresses how clinicians can misuse their professional roles toward patients in IoMT networks. An evaluation analysis assesses the proposed technique’s efficacy compared to existing authentication schemes. The performance analyses demonstrate that the proposed protocol is resilient against various security attacks. Also, the practical usability of the quantum authentication scheme proved its importance as a significant improvement in communication security for IoMT networks.
Abstract In the Internet of Medical Things (IoMT), sensors automatically collect data and transmit it to hospital servers, where doctors provide professional medical advice. The emergence of IoMT has significantly reduced the burden on chronic-disease patients and improved their life security. However, the transmission of patients’ medical data still faces serious confidentiality and integrity risks. This paper proposes a novel healthcare-system architecture that integrates a controlled-authentication semi-quantum key-negotiation (SQKN) protocol, leveraging the unconditional security of quantum cryptography to mitigate potential data attacks. The hospital server acts as a trusted controller that supervises every protocol run and authenticates all participants, which effectively thwarts man-in-the-middle and identity-spoofing attacks. The semi-quantum design further minimizes the quantum-device burden on patients’ side. Experimental simulation under realistic noise (QBER ≈ 0.03 at 0.02/0.04 noise level, 3 000 shots) shows the protocol keeps the quantum-bit error rate below 3 %, while the overall key-generation efficiency reaches 92 %, demonstrating that the scheme resists known attacks and maintains high quantum efficiency for safeguarding IoMT data security.
The emergence and growth of the Internet of Medical Things (IoMT) have transformed the way healthcare services are delivered, but this growth comes with its own security challenges, especially with the emergence of quantum computing. This paper presents a lightweight, privacy-preserving authentication scheme for edge-based IoMT environments, integrating CRYSTALS-Kyber Key Encapsulation Mechanism (KEM) to securely establish session keys between participating entities and resilience against quantum attacks, while CRYSTALS-Dilithium is utilized as the digital signature scheme to ensure message integrity, authentication, and non-repudiation. These NIST-standardized post-quantum primitives collectively strengthen the system's resistance against quantum adversaries and enhance overall cryptographic robustness. The proposed system comprises two phases: Registration and Authentication. During registration, patients, wearable devices that utilize Physically Unclonable Functions (PUFs), and medical specialists register with a Trusted Authority via edge nodes. The authentication phase encompasses mutual authentication among patients, devices, medical specialists, edge nodes, and cloud servers, ensuring that only authorized entities access sensitive health information. In addition, the proposed scheme employs the formal security properties, such as authenticity and secrecy, are verified using the AVISPA tool under the Dolev-Yao model, with results confirming that all defined goals are achieved and no attacks are found. Performance evaluations indicate that the scheme is computationally efficient and suitable for resource-constrained IoMT devices. Furthermore, BAN logic is employed to formally verify the correctness of the authentication protocol, demonstrating that mutual authentication is securely established among the participating entities under well-defined trust assumptions. By integrating post-quantum cryptographic techniques, this authentication framework addresses emerging security challenges posed by quantum computing, aligning with the objectives of enhancing edge-based consumer electronics devices and Internet of Things (IoT) ecosystems with post-quantum cryptosystems.
Secure communication and authentication in the Internet of Medical Things (IoMT) are critical for patient safety and healthcare data protection, yet existing protocols face significant vulnerabilities that remain undetected by conventional verification approaches. This paper presents the computational security verification of an IoMT authentication protocol incorporating NTRU lattice-based post-quantum cryptography using CryptoVerif, a formal verification tool that provides concrete probability bounds under standard cryptographic assumptions. Through systematic analysis of a multi-entity healthcare protocol, this study identifies two critical security flaws overlooked by previous symbolic verification methods: device registration authentication failure enabling man-in-the-middle device substitution attacks, and forward secrecy violation through static key encryption that exposes historical medical data upon key compromise. To address these vulnerabilities, we provide an enhanced protocol incorporating Strong Unforgeability under Chosen Message Attacks (SUF-CMA) MAC-based device authentication that cryptographically binds device identity to patient identity, and HMAC-based key derivation function (HKDF)-derived ephemeral session keys that achieve forward secrecy through fresh key derivation for each communication session. Our CryptoVerif implementation successfully proves nine security properties including mutual authentication, data confidentiality, device binding, and forward secrecy, with aggregate security bound for 128-bit quantum-resistant security. Unlike symbolic verification tools that assume perfect cryptography, our computational analysis provides concrete security guarantees essential for safety-critical healthcare systems.
The Medical Internet of Things (MIoT) plays a pivotal role in modern healthcare by integrating wireless communication and cloud computing to enhance medical practices. However, this framework presents security vulnerabilities, such as the risk of eavesdroppers exploiting public channels to intercept sensitive patient data or impersonate legitimate devices and services. Consequently, authentication between wearable devices and servers is essential before transmitting confidential information through open channels. While several authentication techniques offer protection against quantum attacks, they often incur high communication and computation costs, underscoring the need for further advancement. This paper introduces a multifactor authentication protocol designed to strengthen the integrity of cloud-assisted MIoT systems by incorporating post-quantum security. The proposed protocol utilizes a post-quantum fuzzy commitment (PQFC) scheme to enhance security and is rigorously analyzed under the random oracle model and ProVerif tool. Its functionality and security are thoroughly assessed, demonstrating adherence to key requirements such as memoryless operation, user anonymity, mutual authentication, and resistance to various threats, including biometric tampering, stolen-verifier attacks, and insider attacks. Additionally, a comprehensive comparison with existing schemes highlights a balanced trade-off between security and efficiency.
The convergence of blockchain technology and the Internet of Medical Things (IoMT) significantly enhances data security and interoperability in healthcare systems. However, emerging quantum computing capabilities pose critical threats to conventional cryptographic algorithms underpinning blockchain security. Moreover, as IoMT devices manage sensitive patient data and perform essential healthcare functions, ensuring robust protection against both classical and quantum attacks has become increasingly urgent. To mitigate these risks, this paper introduces a Post-Quantum Cryptography Integration Framework (PQCIF), designed to protect blockchain-enabled IoMT (BIoMT) systems and infrastructures against classical and quantum attacks. PQ-CIF is a hybrid framework leveraging NIST-standardized post-quantum cryptographic (PQC) algorithms combined with conventional public-private key pair cryptography schemes, strategically integrating them within BIoMT architectures for robust long-term security. We provide comprehensive evaluation metrics and present a detailed case study demonstrating the efficacy and minimal overhead of our proposed framework in a simulated healthcare blockchain network.