The integration of consumer-centric digital twin (CCDT) technology is set to transform healthcare systems, enabling blockchain-based solutions for enhanced medical services. By precisely simulating patients and medical processes, CCDT establish a link to the virtual healthcare environment, supporting improved diagnosis, real-time monitoring, and predictive analytics. Blockchain technology is critical in connecting the physical and virtual health care worlds, providing secure storage, efficient communication, reduced computational costs, and reliable hosting services. However, the security of patient data and its digital twin counterpart stored on the blockchain remains a potential vulnerability, as any alteration or unauthorized access to this information could pose significant risks. To address this challenge, we propose a blockchain-enabled quantum encryption protocol for CCDT healthcare networks to ensure secure communication. The proposed protocol leverages blockchain to authenticate patients without relying on third-party entities. At the same time, a secure quantum encryption mechanism ensures that CCDT do not need to authenticate repeatedly when interacting with multiple healthcare providers. A performance evaluation demonstrates the effectiveness of the proposed scheme compared to existing encryption methods. The results indicate that the suggested protocol is resilient against various security threats, showcasing its significant potential for enhancing communication security within CCDT healthcare networks.
The integration of consumer-centric digital twin (CCDT) technology is set to transform healthcare systems, enabling blockchain-based solutions for enhanced medical services. By precisely simulating patients and medical processes, CCDT establish a link to the virtual healthcare environment, supporting improved diagnosis, real-time monitoring, and predictive analytics. Blockchain technology is critical in connecting the physical and virtual health care worlds, providing secure storage, efficient communication, reduced computational costs, and reliable hosting services. However, the security of patient data and its digital twin counterpart stored on the blockchain remains a potential vulnerability, as any alteration or unauthorized access to this information could pose significant risks. To address this challenge, we propose a blockchain-enabled quantum encryption protocol for CCDT healthcare networks to ensure secure communication. The proposed protocol leverages blockchain to authenticate patients without relying on third-party entities. At the same time, a secure quantum encryption mechanism ensures that CCDT do not need to authenticate repeatedly when interacting with multiple healthcare providers. A performance evaluation demonstrates the effectiveness of the proposed scheme compared to existing encryption methods. The results indicate that the suggested protocol is resilient against various security threats, showcasing its significant potential for enhancing communication security within CCDT healthcare networks.
Abstract The integration of quantum-enhanced blockchain and digital twin technologies offers a potent solution for advancing healthcare data security, particularly in ensuring the integrity and confidentiality of medical records. This paper presents a comprehensive framework that leverages quantum computing principles to enhance the security of blockchain networks, while digital twins are utilized for securely managing and accessing medical records. The proposed Quantum-Enhanced Blockchain Architecture employs quantum key distribution protocols and lattice-based cryptography to protect against quantum attacks, ensuring a secure and scalable decentralized system. The Digital Twin Framework for Medical Record Confidentiality integrates encryption and access control mechanisms to safeguard patient data. A novel Healthcare Encryption Algorithm (HEA) is proposed for encrypting and decrypting data in the digital twin, ensuring confidentiality and privacy. Furthermore, the Quantum-Enhanced Blockchain and Digital Twin Integration Process (QBDTIP) outlines the steps involved in securely managing medical records using these technologies. Experimental results demonstrate the system's robustness against cyber-attacks, scalability, interoperability, and effectiveness in ensuring data integrity and confidentiality. Overall, this research highlights the transformative potential of integrating quantum-enhanced blockchain and digital twin technologies for enhancing healthcare data security.
The rapid proliferation of Consumer-Centric Internet of Things (CCIoT) devices has resulted in massive volumes of data being generated and transmitted across edge and cloud infrastructures. However, limited computational and memory resources, coupled with the vulnerabilities of open communication networks, expose CCIoT ecosystems to severe security threats. With the advent of quantum computing, traditional cryptographic schemes risk becoming obsolete, necessitating the integration of quantum cryptography into edge-assisted CCIoT protocols. In this paper, we propose a blockchain-enabled quantum-designated verifier signature protocol designed to ensure secure data transmission and storage within CCIoT networks. The protocol leverages a private blockchain, where peer nodes generate blocks from service-provider data, thereby enhancing confidentiality and integrity. Informal security verification and informal analysis confirm the robustness of the scheme against both classical and quantum adversaries. Extensive experiments, implemented in Python, evaluate the proposed quantum signature protocol theoretically and practically. The results demonstrate strong encryption performance, achieving a computational cost of 41.5 ms and communication overhead of 834 bits, outperforming recent benchmark schemes. The findings highlight the superior reliability, scalability, and efficiency of our approach, offering a viable quantum security solution for future CCIoT ecosystems.
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.
This paper introduces a novel telehealth communication system, designed to enhance the security and integrity of medical data exchange. In the rapidly evolving digital healthcare landscape, the protection of sensitive patient information is paramount. To address this, our system uniquely combines quantum cryptography, specifically the BB84 protocol, with blockchain technology, offering a dual-layered security framework. The Quantum Layer, underpinned by the BB84 protocol, establishes quantum-secure communication channels, effectively encrypting data exchanges between patients, doctors, and hospitals. This layer guarantees that medical information remains confidential and safe from potential quantum-level eavesdropping threats. The subsequent Blockchain Layer further strengthens the system by storing these encrypted communications in an immutable blockchain ledger. This approach not only secures the data against unauthorized alterations but also provides a transparent and permanent record of all transactions, thereby enhancing the auditability of medical communications.
Digital Twins (DTs) play a crucial role in context-aware Internet of Things (IoT) applications within the healthcare sector, including the industrial healthcare domain, by facilitating the continuous sharing of sensitive and confidential patient data from physical objects in real time. This shared data is essential for treatment planning and decision-making processes, often being accessed remotely by authorized users. However, traditional security mechanisms, which rely on the integer factorization problem (IFP) and the elliptic curve discrete logarithm problem (ECDLP), are vulnerable to quantum attacks using algorithms like Shor's, posing significant risks to data protection. As a result, the healthcare sector faces several security challenges, including the vulnerability of sensitive patient data to cyberattacks, quantum threats, the risk of unauthorized access to medical devices and IoT systems, and the increasing sophistication of cybercriminals exploiting weak authentication methods. To address these issues, we propose a quantum-resistant protocol that safeguards data privacy in DT-enabled IoT healthcare applications, ensures secure transmission of information, maintains patient trust, supports long-term data confidentiality, and protects medical devices and IoT systems from potential breaches. By employing lattice-based cryptographic techniques, particularly the ring learning with errors (RLWE) problem, the proposed scheme effectively addresses contemporary security challenges, including those posed by quantum computing. Real-time experiments conducted on Raspberry Pi 4 devices, along with computational overhead analysis, demonstrate the protocol's efficiency. Additionally, formal security validation using the Scyther tool and security analysis with the RoR model reinforce the robustness of the proposed protocol. A comprehensive comparative evaluation against existing schemes highlights its lightweight, scalable, and efficient nature. Furthermore, performance evaluations in the context of unknown attacks show that the proposed scheme significantly outperforms current alternatives in terms of effectiveness.
The growing complexity of healthcare systems requires advanced computational models for real-time monitoring, secure data exchange, and intelligent decision-making. Digital Twins (DTs) provide virtual representations of physical healthcare entities, enabling continuous patient monitoring and personalized care. However, classical DT frameworks face limitations in scalability, computational efficiency, and security. Recent studies have introduced Quantum Digital Twins (QDTs) to enhance performance through quantum computing, addressing challenges such as quantum-resistant security and efficient task offloading in healthcare environments. Despite these advances, most existing QDT models remain constrained by fundamental challenges related to quantum hardware limitations, hybrid classical-quantum system integration, cloud-based quantum access, scalability, and clinical trust. This paper provides a comprehensive review of QDTs for healthcare, with a particular focus on identifying and analyzing the key challenges that currently hinder their real-world adoption. Furthermore, it outlines critical research directions and enabling strategies aimed at advancing the development of secure, reliable, and clinically viable quantum digital twin systems for next-generation healthcare applications.