Securing Healthcare IoT in the Quantum Age
Asif Alif, Khondokar Fida Hasan, Jesse Laeuchli, Mohammad Jabed Morshed Chowdhury · 2025
The Internet of Things (IoT) revolutionised healthcare by enabling remote patient monitoring, improved medication adherence, and chronic disease management. However, this interconnectedness creates vulnerabilities, especially with the looming threat of quantum computing. Quantum computers hold the power to break current encryption standards, safeguarding sensitive patient data in IoT-enabled medical devices. This chapter explores the looming quantum threat to healthcare IoT security. It delves into the potential consequences of compromised encrypted data, including privacy breaches, device malfunctions, and manipulated medical records. To address these issues, the chapter introduces post-quantum cryptography (PQC) and other quantum-resistant techniques (QKD) alongside their key considerations. It analyses the resource constraints (storage, processing power) of typical healthcare IoT devices – pacemakers, monitoring tools, and telemedicine equipment – to determine suitable PQC primitives for different use cases. The chapter then discusses the challenges of implementing these techniques and explores ongoing mitigation projects worldwide.