Robust user authentication model for securing electronic healthcare system using fingerprint biometrics

Abstract

ABSTRACTThe emergence of electronic health or eHealth has revolutionized the healthcare industry to offer better healthcare services at a low and affordable cost. However, it still suffers from security and privacy issues in handling health information. The privacy and security issues in eHealth domain are mainly centered around user authentication, data integrity, data confidentiality, and patient privacy protection. Biometrics technology has considerable opportunities to cope with the above security problems by providing reliable and secure user authentication. However, due to the sensitive nature of health data, the most important challenge lies toward the development of an efficient security model that can guarantee data privacy and reliability, verifying that only authorized personnel can access their corresponding health data. In this paper, we present a comprehensive overview of biometrics applications in eHealth and propose a robust and efficient scheme for user verification using fingerprint biometrics in order to enhance privacy and security in eHealth information systems. Moreover, additional issues like system complexity and processing time related to the use of biometrics should be taken into consideration. We therefore, emphasize to reduce the computation cost in biometric matching. In this work, we use local minutie features for user authentication and employ a fast stereo matching algorithm to compare the minutiae features of the test (probe) fingerprint with the minutiae features extracted from the gallery fingerprints (fingerprint database) in order to verify a person. Experimental results show that the proposed scheme leads to a compromise between the computation efficiency and the accuracy of the verification process. We believe that, our proposed scheme could be employed in real-time applications.