Harnessing healthcare data security in cloud

Healthcare sector has a large volume of information like health records of patients that needs to be collected and stored. These Patient Health Records when equipped digitally become Electronic Health Records (EHRs). This large amount of data collected as EHRs has to be stored, processed and updated frequently. Also the data of the patients has to be available whenever and wherever necessary. Cloud provides the necessary infrastructure now-a-days at low cost and better quality. Cloud computing when used in Healthcare sector lowers the cost of storing, processing and updating with improved quality. But the security of data in the cloud is of concern today. The electronic health records consist of images of patients which are of high security concern. The EHRs include the patient scan images, x-rays etc. which are the patient´s private data. Providing security for a large volume of data with efficiency is required. In this paper we present a novel mechanism by which the EHR images are secured efficiently and the privacy of the patient´s data is preserved. Since the most confidential data of the patients are in the form of images, more care must be taken to secure the images. This is done by reducing the images into pixels and then encrypting the pixels using Paillier Cryptosystem. After the encryption it is stored in the cloud. The original data can be decrypted from the cloud with the private key. The key can be made available to the physicians and other specialists as required by the hospital.