Proceedings of International Conference on Applied Innovation in IT  ·  2026/06/12  ·  Vol. 14  ·  Issue 4  ·  pp. 33–42
Empirical Benchmarking of CRYSTALS-Kyber for Securing Automated Clinical Diagnostics in Internet of Medical Things (IoMT)
Aymen Mudheher Badr, Fadhil Kadhem Zaidan, Dheyab Salman Ibrahim, Hassan Hadi Saleh, Hassan Al-Mahdawi and Hafiz Gulfam Ahmad Umar
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Abstract
As cyber threats continue to evolve in complexity and scale, classical cryptographic architectures are increasingly challenged by the rapid advancement of quantum computing technologies. Standard public-key infrastructure, including symmetric and asymmetric algorithms such as AES and RSA, faces existential vulnerabilities from Cryptographically Relevant Quantum Computers (CRQCs) executing Shor’s and Grover’s algorithms. This situation introduces an urgent need for practical, empirical evaluations of post-quantum cryptographic frameworks within critical infrastructure. Departing from standard textbook-style surveys, this study presents an empirical investigation into the integration of Post-Quantum Cryptography (PQC) within the Internet of Medical Things (IoMT) to secure sensitive automated clinical diagnostics. Specifically, we propose an edge-to-cloud secure communication pipeline utilizing the National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST) standardized CRYSTALS-Kyber-512 Key Encapsulation Mechanism (KEM) to secure high-fidelity diagnostic outputs (such as CNN-ViT micro-tumor detection data streams).Using an ARM-based edge-computing testbed, we benchmark Kyber-512 against classical RSA-2048 and ECC (secp256r1) standards across critical performance metrics, including key generation time, encapsulation latency, and communication overhead. The empirical findings demonstrate that Kyber-512 yields an exceptional reduction in computational overhead, achieving a 96% reduction in encapsulation latency compared to ECC encryption, while successfully maintaining Level 1 quantum resilience. Furthermore, the study formally addresses the bandwidth-computation trade-off, demonstrating that contemporary 5G/6G-enabled medical networks can seamlessly absorb lattice-based payload sizes to preserve edge CPU processing bounds. Ultimately, this research provides a reproducible cryptographic blueprint and a structured, three-phase strategic roadmap to mitigate "Harvest Now, Decrypt Later" (HNDL) exfiltration threats, ensuring sustainable, long-term data privacy and regulatory compliance in modern smart healthcare digital infrastructures.
Keywords
Quantum Encryption Post-Quantum Cryptography (PQC) Internet of Medical Things (IoMT) CRYSTALS-Kyber-512 Lattice-Based Cryptography Clinical Diagnostics
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