POST-QUANTUM SECURITY FOR CLOUD-BASED DIGITAL TWINS: A FRAMEWORK FOR NEXT-GENERATION HEALTHCARE AND SMART CAMPUSES

Abstract

The proliferation of cloud-based digital twins across critical infrastructures—including hospital patient-monitoring systems and university smart campuses—has created an urgent need to secure the continuous, high-fidelity data streams that bind physical assets to their virtual counterparts. Conventional public-key cryptography, based on integer factorization and elliptic-curve discrete logarithms, is increasingly exposed to future cryptographically relevant quantum computers (CRQCs) capable of executing Shor's algorithm, leaving digital twin telemetry, control commands, and identity credentials vulnerable to “harvest-now, decrypt-later” attacks. This paper proposes a post-quantum security framework for cloud-based digital twins that integrates NIST-standardized lattice-based primitives—the Module-Lattice-Based Key-Encapsulation Mechanism (ML-KEM, FIPS 203) and the Module-Lattice-Based Digital Signature Algorithm (ML-DSA, FIPS 204)—into a hybrid classical/post-quantum key-establishment and twin-state authentication protocol. The framework is evaluated across two representative deployments: a remote patient-monitoring healthcare digital twin and a multi-building smart campus digital twin, using a cloud-edge testbed instrumented with resource-constrained IoT gateways. Comparative benchmarking against RSA-2048 and ECDSA P-256 baselines shows that a hybrid X25519+ML-KEM-768 handshake adds only modest latency overhead while providing quantum resistance, and that ML-DSA-65 signatures, despite larger payloads, remain compatible with the sub-second synchronization budgets required by both domains. Results across more than 5,000 simulated concurrent digital twins indicate that post-quantum digital twin security is practically achievable today through careful protocol design, algorithm-tier selection, and crypto-agile architecture, offering healthcare and campus operators a concrete migration pathway ahead of the arrival of cryptographically relevant quantum computers.