Electronic Health Record Security in Cloud: Medical Data Protection Using Homomorphic Encryption Schemes

Abstract

Security is the primary issue nowadays because cybercrimes are increasing. The organizations can store and maintain their data on their own, but it is not cost effective, so for convenience they are choosing cloud. Due to its popularity, the healthcare organizations are storing their sensitive data to cloud-based storage systems, that is, electronic health records (EHR). One of the most feasible methods for maintaining privacy is homomorphism encryption (HE). HE can combine different services without losing security or displaying sensitive data. HE is nothing but computations performed on encrypted data. According to the type of operations and limited number of operations performed on encrypted data, it is categorized into three types: partially homomorphic encryption (PHE), somewhat homomorphic encryption (SWHE), fully homomorphic encryption (FHE). HE method is very suitable for the EHR, which requires data privacy and security.