Post-quantum cryptography for healthcare data
Healthcare data has one of the longest confidentiality lifetimes of any industry — a patient record created today may need to stay private for that person’s entire life. That makes it a textbook target for harvest-now-decrypt-later attacks.
The mismatch
Most clinical systems still protect data in transit with TLS using elliptic-curve key exchange, and sign records with ECDSA or RSA. Both are on NIST’s deprecation clock. A record encrypted today with classical crypto is recordable today and decryptable later.
What to migrate first
Prioritise long-lived secrets: stored backups, archived records, and any data crossing networks you do not control. Move key exchange to ML-KEM (FIPS 203) in hybrid mode, and use ML-DSA (Dilithium, FIPS 204) for signatures on records that must remain verifiable for decades — a classical signature becomes forgeable once large quantum computers exist.
Honest scope
Post-quantum algorithms are resistant to known classical and quantum attacks per NIST — they are not unbreakable, and they are one layer of a broader security and compliance posture, not a silver bullet. The point is durability: starting the migration now because the recording is already happening.
Try it yourself — live, free, verifiable in 30 seconds:
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