Protecting Healthcare data using cryptographic algorithm.

Healthcare data are vital in patients surveillance.

These data should have greatest quality to provide premium treatment to patients. Many security threats affect originality of medical data. Nowadays anytime anywhere access of medical data is provided with the help of astonishing technology called cloud computing. Cloud computing based healthcare has enormous healthcare applications however, it facilitates data abuse such as data breach and healthcare fraud. Sensitive, protected data is theft by the unauthorized or authorized person due to data abuse which vitiates the quality of medical service.

The securing of data routing is done in cloud based healthcare to enhance security of medical data. Encryption algorithms are used to provide data confidentiality. Hashing techniques guarantee data integrity.

How to provides security to healthcare data?

There are several instances where one to one mapping of various elements of data is crucial for many procedures considered critical from a safety perspective.

Someone who could access this mapping, can with a great ease, have huge impact on business, if he wishes to damage things up. So, how does one safeguard this mapping?

There are various ways of doing this. We will discuss a few of them here.

Let’s assume, we need to protect cholesterol level of individuals in an organization. Now cholesterol level might not sound that critical, however one can imagine several other elements which might be extremely important otherwise. One shall maintain the employee id in plaintext in a table column in database and corresponding cholesterol level of that employee in second column of the same table, however the cholesterol level is encrypted. Now one could deploy column level encryption for encrypting all values of the column that stores the cholesterol data. Nevertheless, an attacker could simply swap encrypted values between two (or more) cells and could potentially cause damage. So how do we defend against this? Encrypting both elements of mapping might not help, as the attacker can still mix up values between different cells.

Unlike above, we can encrypt one element of the mapping. Once done, both the elements could be used for generating ‘fingerprint’. Now, the fingerprint must be encrypted using a key kept in a vault/secure storage. While the attacker can still mix up the element which constitute the mapping, he will not be able to arrive at an encrypted fingerprint (of mixed up mapping elements), as he doesn’t have access to the encryption key stored in vault. Whenever any business process needs this mapping, one can easily check integrity of the pair of elements by using the encrypted fingerprint. Hashing can be used for preventing data modification by the third party. Encryption of medical data provides confidentiality.

A data breach is one of the types of data abuse that is nothing but security incident in which sensitive, protected or confidential data is copied, transmitted, viewed, stolen or used by an individual unauthorized or authorized person. Information contained in health care records has longer value and is rich enough for identity theft. Health care is the most affected industry by data breach. 

Medical fraud is the major risky data abuse which modifies health parameters. Since doctors give treatment based on the healthcare data medical fraud leads to loss of life. This erroneous information affects economy and human life.