An Enhanced Cryptographic Algorithm in Securing Healthcare Medical Records

Abstract

E-health is used in a variety of digital technologies. The internet, for example, enables users of e-health to connect to health workers via e-mail, access medical records, examine health data and exchange useful information on an individual basis. As ehealth deals with highly sensitive information, it is important to implement robust cryptographic algorithms to enhance its security. Cryptography is a vital component of all information security systems to protect private information from unauthorized access, ensuring confidentiality, data integrity, authentication and other tasks. This paper proposes a modified version of the hill cipher by implementing a double encryption and decryption process with integration of non-linear operations such as transposition, substitution, circular bit shifting, and exclusive-OR operation to strengthen the key security used during the encryption of healthcare data content and to boost the unpredictability of the ciphertext, which enhances data protection across unsecured networks. The results of experiments conducted on 336 medical records validate the enhanced method’s favorable performance as it improved in key security with an avalanche effect average of 52.45% and the unpredictability of the ciphertext which also achieved an average entropy index of 7.01%.