Healthcare Security: Post-Quantum Continuous Authentication With Behavioral Biometrics Using Vector Similarity Search

Abstract

With the increasing digitization of medical records and the interconnected nature of healthcare networks, robust security measures are vital to mitigate the risk of data breaches, cyberattacks, and unauthorized access. Existing healthcare security models, like one-time authentication (OTA), rely on complex mathematical problems such as the integer factorization problem (IFP) and discrete logarithm problem (DLP). However, advancements in quantum computing, notably Shor’s algorithm, pose a threat to the security of these systems. Once the attacker bypasses OTA, they gain permanent access and can reveal sensitive healthcare user information. Given the numerous vulnerabilities exposed in OTA systems, there is a rising demand and trend toward implementing continuous authentication systems. Current cutting-edge privacy technologies either are not feasible or entail high costs for continuous authentication systems, which necessitate periodic real-time verification. As a result, we proposed a cutting-edge novel approach to healthcare security through post-quantum continuous authentication without breaking the continuity of a session, leveraging behavioral biometrics (BB) and vector similarity search (VSS). By integrating BB, which analyzes individual behavioral patterns, with VSS, our robust lightweight quantum-secure technique ensures a heightened level of security. The proposed framework offers seamless and continuous authentication, adapting in real-time to users’ behavioral patterns. The proof of concept for VSS demonstrates the efficiency of the proposed scheme in real-time healthcare applications. Through extensive testing, analysis, and performance analysis under unknown attacks, this study demonstrates the efficacy and resilience of our approach, promising a new frontier in healthcare security. A real-time testbed experiment, along with the implementation and design of FastAPI, demonstrates the novelty of the proposed scheme.