The Role of Cryptography in Ensuring the Confidentiality and Integrity of Medical Records in Healthcare Organizations

Security is a serious issue for businesses worldwide because of how quickly communication technology has changed and how many different types of attacks there have been. In fact, the basis of security protection is cryptographic methods, which play a critical role in preventing network attacks. To shed light, cryptography is the science of encrypting the data into an unreadable format and decrypted by only authorized parties. Thus, the fundamental goal of cryptography is to protect the data while it is in transit in the network from being accessed by attackers. Definitely, as technology and communication networks advance, new security concerns and difficulties emerge, making it critical for businesses worldwide to invest in security assurance for their services. Consequently, cryptography is considered a significant demand in any organization to overcome those issues. Specifically, highlighting healthcare, the amount of recorded data in a digital manner is increasing sharply daily. Due to its sensitivity, its confidentiality and integrity should be maintained by adopting strong cryptographic algorithms. This paper uses CrypTool 1 and Cryptool2 to analyze the role of cryptography in ensuring medical records confidentiality by adopting the latest strong symmetric-key block cipher algorithm. Nevertheless, it will discuss using the cryptographic hash function to ensure integrity and user authentication.