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 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.
Internet of Medical Things (IoMT) is an advanced ecosystem made with the help of Internet of Things technology, smart sensors, medical equipment, and connected end users. Internet of Medical Things is very helpful to enhance efficiency, accuracy, and qualities traditional healthcare system. A smart IoMT contains end users, heterogeneous network, and private data is transferred through public channel. Therefore, it becomes hard to achieve both security and privacy in the IoMT system. In this article, we have focused on designing privacy preserving authenticated key mechanism between two parties. We have proposed a blockchain assisted authenticated key exchange mechanism for IoMT systems supporting fog computing paradigm. The proposed privacy preserving authenticated key exchange protocol is based post quantum assumption “ring learning with errors” and physical unclonable function (PUF), respectively. A detailed security analysis ensures that proposed protocol is secure against most of the existing attacks. This protocol is also secure against quantum attacks based on the assumption.
The Medical Internet of Things (MIoT) has promoted smart healthcare through the deep integration of wearable devices, wireless communication, and cloud services. However, this framework faces security risks, as attackers may exploit public channels to impersonate legitimate devices or services and steal sensitive data. Therefore, establishing authentication between wearable devices and servers prior to data transmission is crucial. Existing schemes suffer from two critical drawbacks: vulnerability to quantum attacks and excessively high communication overhead, highlighting the need for improved solutions. The authors of this paper present a multi-factor identity authentication protocol to achieve post-quantum security and privacy protection. The scheme integrates lattice-based Kyber key encapsulation and a fuzzy commitment mechanism to secure biological templates and enable post-quantum key agreement. Additionally, hash functions and lightweight error correction codes are employed to reduce terminal communication overhead. The security of the scheme is rigorously proved in the Real-or-Random model, and the analysis confirms that the scheme satisfies common security requirements for wireless networks. The proposed scheme is also compared with existing schemes, and the results demonstrate that it achieves a balance between security and overhead.
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.
Abstract In internet of things (IOT) healthcare systems, sensitive patient information is transmitted over the network to medical professionals. Numerous lightweight authentication protocols have been proposed; however, most of them remain vulnerable to various cyberattacks, allowing attackers to eavesdrop on or manipulate transmitted data. We examine several recently proposed lightweight authentication schemes for healthcare systems. Our security analysis demonstrates that these schemes remain vulnerable to malicious gateway attacks, desynchronization attacks, and key screw attacks. .To address these issues and ensure post- quantum security in healthcare IoT, we propose a post-quantum key establishment protocol based on lattice- based cryptography (LWE). the proposed scheme prevents the gateway from accessing both the secret keys and their parameters, thereby eliminating the possibility of malicious gateway attacks. The proposed protocol ensures user anonymity, forward secrecy, and resistance to impersonation, key screw, and desynchronization attacks.. The proposed protocol ensures secure and efficient establishment of three-round key establishment among entities . Our performance evaluation shows that the proposed scheme achieves lower computation and communication overhead compared to recent related works. The security of the protocol is thoroughly analyzed through informal reasoning, Burrows–Abadi–Needham (BAN) logic, and ProVerif, confirming its robustness and suitability for resource-constrained IoT-based healthcare environments.
The imminent advent of quantum computing threatens the long-term security of classical public-key cryptography, creating critical challenges for resource-constrained internet of things (IoT) environments.Hybrid cryptographic frameworks combining elliptic curve cryptography (ECC) with post-quantum cryptography (PQC) primitives have emerged as a transitional solution; however, their security properties remain insufficiently validated under semi-trusted infrastructure assumptions.This paper presents a comprehensive security evaluation of a hybrid ECC-KEM authentication and key agreement framework targeting IoT deployments.Using a dual-verification methodology that integrates formal symbolic analysis with the Tamarin-Prover and practical AI-assisted testing via the APSVer tool, we identify a critical impersonation vulnerability that enables a semi-trusted third party (TTP) to reconstruct PUF-based authentication material.To mitigate this flaw, we introduce a protocol enhancement incorporating ML-DSA post-quantum digital signatures and device-isolated key derivation.Formal verification confirms that the enhanced protocol achieves mutual authentication, session key secrecy, replay resistance, and effective isolation of the TTP.Experimental performance analysis demonstrates that the proposed security improvements introduce only a 12%-15% computational overhead, preserving feasibility for constrained IoT devices.The proposed framework provides a practical, quantum-resilient authentication architecture suitable for next-generation secure IoT deployments.
The Internet of Medical Things (IoMT) has become a core component of modern healthcare infrastructures, enabling continuous patient monitoring, remote diagnostics, and data-driven clinical decision-making. Despite these advances, authentication in IoMT environments remains a critical security challenge, intensified by strict resource constraints of medical devices and the emerging threat posed by quantum computing to classical cryptographic techniques. This systematic review investigates authentication mechanisms in IoMT from both post-quantum and system-level perspectives. A structured literature review was conducted using a PRISMA-informed methodology across major scientific databases, including IEEE Xplore, ACM Digital Library, SpringerLink, ScienceDirect, and MDPI. From an initial set of 95 records, 63 studies were selected for qualitative synthesis following screening and eligibility assessment. To organise existing research, this study introduces a multi-dimensional classification framework that categorises authentication solutions according to cryptographic paradigm (classical, hybrid, and post-quantum), deployment architecture, system objectives, and clinical operational constraints. The comparative synthesis demonstrates important trade-offs between security strength, latency, computational overhead, and energy consumption that are frequently underexplored in the existing literature. Furthermore, the analysis identifies key research gaps related to scalability in heterogeneous medical environments, trust establishment across administrative and clinical domains, usability under strict timing constraints, and resilience against quantum-capable adversaries. Based on these findings, future research directions are outlined toward adaptive, lightweight, and context-aware post-quantum authentication frameworks designed for real-world IoMT deployments. Limitations of this review include restriction to English-language publications and selected databases. This study received no external funding, and the review protocol was not formally registered.