Utilizing Homomorphic Encryption to Implement Secure and Private Medical Cloud Computing

Abstract

With a large number of commercially-available noninvasive health monitoring sensors today, remote health monitoring of patients in their homes is becoming widespread. In remote health monitoring, acquired sensory data is transferred into a private or public cloud for storage and processing. While simple encryption techniques can assure data privacy in the case of private clouds, ensuring data privacy becomes a lot more challenging when a public cloud (e.g., Amazon EC2) is used to store and process data. We present an approach that eliminates data privacy concerns in the public cloud scenario, by utilizing an emerging encryption technique called Fully Homomorphic Encryption (FHE). The ability of FHE to allow computations without actually observing the data itself makes it an attractive option for certain medical applications. In this paper, we use cardiac health monitoring for our feasibility assessment and demonstrate the advantages and challenges of our approach by utilizing a well-established FHE library called HElib.