The Future of Medical Device Cybersecurity : Preparing for Quantum Computing Threats

Adding IoT technologies to medical devices has made it possible to monitor patients all the time, diagnose from a distance and commu- nicate health data live. Even so, this progress in technology makes medical IoT systems more vulnerable to cyber-attack. For resource- limited medical devices, traditional cryptographic methods, mainly ECC, have delivered both high security and good efficiency. Still, new quantum computing technologies threaten most existing ECC schemes and their relatives, so the swift assessment of quantum-resistant op- tions is necessary. The goal of this thesis is to test how replacing ECC with Kyber512 could change the security of devices used in medical IoT. Both simulation and analysis of benchmarks are used in this study. The use of NIST benchmark data in the analysis guarantees that the methods for ECC and Kyber512 are equivalent. Results show that ECC makes the best use of hardware in simple systems, consuming little CPU power and memory which is important for today’s modern med- ical devices. Security with Kyber512 comes at a cost, it needs bigger RAM and takes more time for encapsulation and decapsulation. Such requirements are difficult to meet by legacy or highly limited medical devices. This thesis also looks at how regulations are prepared, finding that both HIPAA and FDA in healthcare are slow to adopt changes related to PQC. In addition, the committee suggests mixing Elliptic Curve Cryptography and Kyber512 so that systems can gradually update over time. Suggested improvements are raising the speed of hardware, improving power usage and preparing cloud-ready PQC testing environments. The field also recommends that healthcare regu- latory bodies require that newer systems be at least quantum-resilient at their core. The thesis asserts that ECC offers protection today, but playing it smart and choosing Kyber512 is crucial for building secure IoT in medical devices moving forward. This research addresses an important gap in related studies by comparing ECC and Kyber512 under realistic healthcare conditions, making it easy for industry and academia to plan for a quantum future. By blending how systems are run with forward-looking ideas, the study forms a basic structure to defend medical data and infrastructure from upcoming cryptographic risks.