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.
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 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.
The rapid integration of the Internet of Medical Things (IoMT) into healthcare systems raises urgent demands for secure communication mechanisms capable of protecting sensitive patient data. Quantum key agreement (QKA), a collaborative approach to key generation based on quantum principles, provides an attractive alternative to traditional quantum key distribution (QKD), as it eliminates dependence on a trusted authority and ensures equal participation from all users. QKA demonstrates particular suitability for IoMT’s decentralized medical networks by eliminating trusted authority dependence while ensuring equitable participation among all participants. This addresses fundamental challenges where centralized trust models introduce vulnerabilities and asymmetric access patterns that compromise egalitarian principles essential for medical data sharing. However, practical QKA applications in IoMT remain limited, particularly for schemes that avoid complex entanglement operations and authenticated classical channels. Among the few QKA protocols employing Grover’s search algorithm (GSA), existing proposals potentially suffer from limitations in fairness and security. In this paper, the author proposes an improved GSA-based QKA protocol that ensures fairness, security, and correctness without requiring an authenticated classical communication channel. The proposed scheme guarantees that each participant’s input equally contributes to the final key, preventing manipulation by any user subgroup. The scheme combines Grover’s algorithm with the decoy photon technique to ensure secure quantum transmission. Security analysis confirms resistance to external attacks, including intercept-resend, entanglement probes, and device-level exploits, as well as insider threats such as parameter manipulation. Fairness is achieved through a symmetric protocol design rooted in quantum mechanical principles. Efficiency evaluation shows a theoretical efficiency of approximately 25%, while eliminating the need for quantum memory. These results position the proposed protocol as a practical and scalable solution for future secure quantum communication systems, particularly within distributed IoMT environments.
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 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.
The Internet of Medical Things (IoMT) is a network of medical devices, hardware infrastructure, and software that accumulates real-time data through remote monitoring and minimizes doctor-patient interaction, enhancing the quality of remedies. However, the facile availability and accessibility of data over the web have given rise to serious information security and credibility issues in the IoMT. Recently, Chen et al. [1] proposed a provably secure authenticated key agreement protocol for remote patient monitoring in IoMT. However, after revisiting their scheme, we found security flaws such as user impersonation, ephemeral secret leakage attacks, denial-of-service attacks, and session key disclosure attacks. Therefore, this paper presents cryptanalysis as well as an improvement of Chen et al. 's scheme that strives to furnish protocols with robust security in opposition to the mentioned attacks. The security and effectiveness are displayed through informal analysis and evaluation with other existing state-of-the-art metrics like computational and commu-nication cost. At last, the findings project the superiority of the proposed improved scheme.
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.