Experimental evaluation of query processing on encrypted Telemedicine data

While Telemedicine technology greatly increases the quality of medical care with less health care costs, it also raises critical challenges for data security and privacy in the course of data entry, data review, patient education, video conference, and electronic monitoring. To meet these various needs, a number of different of security strategies can be utilized. In this study, we aim to secure user-related Telemedicine data by storing and distributing them in an encrypted form, so that on the one hand the requirement on secure medical data management is satisfied, while on the other hand efficient processing, particularly the efficient querying of encrypted medical data can still be guaranteed. Given the increasing use of eXtensible Markup Language (XML) in describing and interchanging data between systems and users, querying over encrypted XML Telemedicine data becomes more and more important. In [3], we develop an effective hash-based approach to enable efficient querying over encrypted XML data. The basic idea is to augment encrypted XML data with encodings which characterize the topology and content of tree-structured XML data, and then filter out candidate XML data for decryption and query execution by examining XPath queries against these encodings. A generic framework is provided which consists of three phases, namely, “query preparation”, “query pre-processing” and “query execution”, for the proposed search strategy. This paper presents a comprehensive experimental evaluation of querying over encrypted XML-formated Telemedicine data.