Ensuring patients privacy in a cryptographic-based-electronic health records using bio-cryptography

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Ensuring patients’ privacy in a cryptographic-based- electronic health records using bio-cryptography Adebayo Omotosho* Department of Computer Science and Information Technology, Bells University of Technology, P.M.B 1015, Ota, Ogun State, Nigeria Email: bayotosho@gmail.com *Corresponding author Justice Emuoyibofarhe Department of Computer Science and Engineering, Ladoke Akintola University of Technology, P.M.B 4000, Ogbomoso, Oyo State, Nigeria Email: eojustice@gmail.com Christoph Meinel Hasso Plattner Institute (HPI) for IT Systems Engineering, University of Potsdam, Potsdam, 14482, Germany Email: meinel@hpi.de Abstract: Several recent works have proposed and implemented cryptography as a means to preserve privacy and security of patient’s health data. Nevertheless, the weakest point of electronic health record (EHR) systems
that relied on these cryptographic schemes is key management. Thus,
this paper presents the development of privacy and security system
for cryptography-based-EHR by taking advantage of the uniqueness of fingerprint and iris characteristic features to secure cryptographic keys in a
bio-cryptography framework. The results of the system evaluation showed significant improvements in terms of time efficiency of this approach to cryptographic-based-EHR. Both the fuzzy vault and fuzzy commitment demonstrated false acceptance rate (FAR) of 0%, which reduces the likelihood
of imposters gaining successful access to the keys protecting patients’ protected health information. This result also justifies the feasibility of implementing fuzzy key binding scheme in real applications, especially fuzzy vault which demonstrated a better performance during key reconstruction. Keywords: EHR; electronic health record; biometrics; cryptography; privacy; accountability. Reference to this paper should be made as follows: Omotosho, A., Emuoyibofarhe, J. and Meinel, C. (xxxx) ‘Ensuring patients’ privacy in a cryptographic-based-electronic health records using bio-cryptography’,
Int. J. Electronic Healthcare, Vol. x, No. x, pp.xxx–xxx.

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Biographical notes: Adebayo Omotosho received his PhD in Computer Science at Ladoke Akintola University of Technology in 2016. He is a Seasoned Computer Programmer and has taken part in a number of programming competitions in C/C++/C#. His current research interests are health informatics, computer security, big data analytics and biometrics. Justice Emuoyibofarhe is a Professor of Computing at Ladoke Akintola University of Technology. He received his PhD in 2004. He specialises in neuro-fuzzy computing computational optimisation. He had post-doctoral fellowship at the Centre of Excellence for Mobile e-service, University of Zululand, South Africa in 2006. He is a Member of the IEEE Computational Intelligence Society. He is also a Visiting Researcher at the Hasso Plattner Institute, University of Potsdam, Germany. His present research area is in the application of mobile computing and wireless communication to e-health and telemedicine. Christoph Meinel is a German Scientist and a University Professor of Computer Sciences. He is President and CEO of the Hasso Plattner Institute (HPI) for IT Systems Engineering at the University of Potsdam (Germany), and a Professor for Internet Technologies and Systems. Besides his teaching activities in Potsdam, he is an Honorary Professor at the Technical University of Beijing (China), a Visiting Professor at the Shanghai University (China), and a Senior Research Fellow of SnT at the University of Luxembourg. He is a Chairman or a member of various international scientific boards and program committees, and has organised several internal symposia and conferences.

1 Introduction Healthcare Information and Management Systems Society defines electronic health record (EHR) as “a secure, real-time, point-of-care, patient centric information resource for clinicians” (HIMSS, 2003). EHR is on the verge of receiving widespread adoption as an instrument for improving the understanding of the state of health of individuals as it contains useful, legal and computerised historical health data from a variety of sources. Over time, a patient’s EHR accumulates significant information, such as identifying information, hospital visitations, laboratory data, surgery, radiology reports, allergies, vital signs, immunisations, prescriptions, sexual preference, psychological profiles, physician progress notes and among other relevant data that defines a medical record (Mercuri, 2004; Tiwari and Kumar, 2015). The importance of these data to healthcare providers, patients and cyb

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