Augmented security for healthcare data using obfuscation and elliptic curve cryptography algorithm in health cloud environment

Abstract

SummaryIn the past few years, the growing demands of cloud computing became high in the healthcare sector. The electronic health record (EHR) has turned out to be the chosen system to uphold patient's healthcare data. Due to the advancement of cloud computing, the users in the cloud are empowered to access their data with elasticity and offering huge storage capability at minimum costs. This motivates EHR maintainers to transfer their personal storage to the remote cloud servers as it significantly reduces the burden of storage and computation. Nevertheless, securing healthcare data file poses a gigantic challenge as data outsourced in the cloud are too sensitive. Several security features such as data confidentiality, data privacy, access control, data integrity, and data security necessities to be satisfied. This article proposed a secure sharing of healthcare data file by incorporating obfuscation technique and elliptic curve cryptography (ECC) algorithm to enforce better data confidentiality and integrity. Data obfuscation is a beneficial technique in preserving the data confidentiality on the cloud by minimizing the risk of data theft and data leakage. Moreover, ECC methodology aims to provide a high level of security, low communication and computation cost with smaller key size. Experimental analysis reveals better performance than other existing schemes in terms of computation time, communication time, key generation time, throughput rate, turnaround time, and uploading speed. Besides, it exposes that the proposed framework is highly secure and efficient in the field of healthcare system.