Post-Quantum TLS 1.3 Gateway Pilot at Kaohsiung Veterans General Hospital Tainan Branch, Reported at Taiwan's Hospital FHIR Seminar on 6 November 2026
What a hospital in Tainan tested, and where Taiwan's health ministry will start
Quentir Medicine Monitor
Evidence-based insights for quantum medicine.
A regional hospital in southern Taiwan has placed a post-quantum TLS 1.3 gateway in front of its connections and tested it without touching its core hospital information system or its databases. The Kaohsiung Veterans General Hospital Tainan Branch presented that pilot on 6 November 2026, at a seminar on post-quantum migration for hospitals built around the FHIR standard for health data exchange.
The seminar was organized by the Institute for Information Industry (III) and the National Cheng Kung University Research and Development Foundation, under the guidance of the Administration for Digital Industries of Taiwan's Ministry of Digital Affairs. Their press release of 10 November 2026, distributed through the Central News Agency's business wire, calls the Tainan pilot the first post-quantum migration case in Taiwan carried out in a hospital during live operation. That description comes from the organizers; the release gives no technical report, algorithm list or test data behind it.
Wang Mei-chu, deputy director of the Department of Information Management at the Ministry of Health and Welfare, said the ministry will first plan and trial post-quantum protection for the healthcare professional certificates that doctors and nurses use to sign and authenticate, together with the security of cross-hospital data exchange. She also encouraged hospitals to use government program funds for small proof-of-concept projects.
For hospital buyers outside Taiwan, the useful part is the sequence. A health ministry has chosen where post-quantum work starts, one hospital has a working gateway pilot, and a medical center is testing encrypted transport on a shared care platform. Each step is small enough for an outside hospital to compare with its own plans.
Cheng Chih-yang, who directs the Smart Healthcare Management Center at the Tainan branch, described the hospital's demonstration. According to the release, the team completed post-quantum protection and testing of TLS 1.3 connections through a gateway, with no effect on hospital operations and no changes to the internal hospital information system (HIS) or its databases. TLS is the protocol that encrypts traffic between a browser or application and a server; version 1.3 is the current one.
Forescout's October 2026 Healthcare Report Finds 6% of Medical IoT Devices on Post-Quantum-Capable SSH and 31% of Exposed Hospital Systems on TLS 1.3
What a hospital-network survey of 2.5 million devices found, October 2026
Quentir Medicine Monitor
Evidence-based insights for quantum medicine.
A CT scan taken in a hospital this week will still describe the same patient in 2040. The encryption that carries that image from the scanner to the archive, and from the archive to an outside radiologist, was mostly designed for a world without large quantum computers.
The security firm Forescout has now put numbers on that gap. Its research report PQC in Healthcare: From Data Risk to Migration Readiness, released in early October 2026, looks at how far hospital networks have moved toward post-quantum cryptography, the new public-key algorithms meant to resist a future quantum computer. The answer is uneven. In the enterprise networks Forescout tracks, half of ordinary IT devices run OpenSSH versions that support the new algorithms. Among the devices of the Internet of Medical Things, such as infusion pumps, patient monitors and imaging equipment, the share is 6%.
The report also searched the open internet for hospital systems that anyone can reach. It found more than 5,500 of them, mostly electronic medical record platforms and image archives, and only 31% of those systems support TLS 1.3, the only version of the web's standard encryption protocol that can carry the standardized post-quantum key exchange.
For a hospital board or a chief medical information officer, the figures separate the devices a hospital can upgrade on its own from the devices whose encryption changes only when a manufacturer ships new firmware. They come from one vendor's customer data and from public internet scans, so they describe the networks Forescout can see, not a random sample of all hospitals.
The dataset comes from Forescout's own device cloud: more than 2.5 million connected devices across more than 50 healthcare delivery organizations, an average of around 50,000 devices per organization. About two-thirds are IT assets, such as workstations and servers. The rest are network equipment, building and facility systems, and medical devices, which make up about 5% of the total.
A Village Health Kiosk, 70 Kilometers of Fiber, and 12.7 Bits a Second
Two links, two very different sets of numbers
In a health kiosk in the Thuringian village of Sundhausen, a participant sat down for a fifteen-minute simulated consultation with a physician at the university hospital in Jena, and audio and video ran without interruption. The keys protecting that traffic came from polarization-entangled photon pairs sent down installed telecommunications fiber. A German research team has now published its field report, pairing entanglement-based quantum key distribution on the BBM92 protocol with end-to-end post-quantum cryptography running sntrup761 and ML-KEM-768. The network spans about 140 kilometers in total, arranged as two links through a trusted node at Erfurt: 70 kilometers from Sundhausen with 51 of them aerial, and 69 kilometers from Jena that are almost entirely buried.
The fiber construction shows up in the measurements
On the aerial-heavy village link the secure key rate averaged 12.7 bits per second with a standard deviation of 10.3, at a quantum bit error rate of 13.3 percent. On the mostly buried Jena link the same system produced 22.2 bits per second with a deviation of 4.7, at an error rate of 6.1 percent. Nearly twice the key rate on the buried link, less than half the error rate, and an error-rate spread of 0.8 points against 9.6. The authors report that error-rate variation on the aerial link correlated most strongly with wind speed. The two links were operated separately, for 22 days and 2 days respectively, so the 22-day endurance figure belongs to the village link alone, and the final hop into the hospital used previously generated keys from a local keystore.
What a hospital would actually be buying
The quantum keys were pushed straight into standard Linux VPN tunnels between adjacent nodes, with no dedicated key management system and no modification to the existing medical systems, which is the commercially load-bearing choice for buyers who cannot re-platform. Trusted nodes remain the structural caveat: four European cybersecurity agencies hold that end-to-end security cannot be achieved over long distances using fibre-based quantum key distribution, and place the clear priority on post-quantum cryptography. Set against a breach record in which vulnerability exploitation accounts for 20 percent of healthcare intrusions, a hardened regional link answers one threat model and leaves the other untouched.
Quantum entropy without the fiber
The debate usually settles into quantum key distribution versus post-quantum cryptography, and both depend on the randomness the keys are made from. Chip-scale quantum random number generators, such as Quantum eMotion's electron-tunneling design reported at 1.8 gigabits per second and already running with Becton Dickinson and GreyBox Solutions in remote patient monitoring, deliver that entropy at the endpoint itself, with no dedicated fiber, no weather exposure and no intermediate node to trust. Quantum-grade keys and quantum key distribution are separable purchases, and for most clinical endpoints the chip fits the installed base.