Applying secure multi-party computation to improve collaboration in healthcare cloud

Abstract

Healthcare organizations are interested in adopting collaborative systems to improve the quality of medical services. Recently, cloud computing has fueled the integration of modern information and communication technologies in the healthcare system. In fact, this new paradigm provides computational resources to the end users as services. Furthermore, it is used to share medical information across the healthcare ecosystem. But, protecting the patient's privacy in this environment is still a challenge that must be overcome. In fact, medical information is sensitive data that should be kept secret against unauthorized users. To achieve this goal, we propose an approach based on Secure Multi-party Computation (SMC) protocols to ensure privacy-preserving in the collaborative systems. In this concept, different organizations collaborate to accomplish common goals without allowing any party to view and reveal another individual's private data. This paper aims at providing the fundamentals of the proposed protocols and their main applications in the healthcare system. In this context, we propose a framework based on SMC for privacy-preserving collaborative environment in the healthcare sector. The proposed solution is based on the Paillier scheme to ensure data security. This is achieved by exploiting the additive homomorphic property of this public key cryptosystem.