Secured Homomorphic Encryption and Authentication for Healthcare

Secure communication and data processing is one of the vital requirements for applications like healthcare, feedback systems, voting etc. In the traditional cryptographic algorithms, the data is to be decrypted before processing. When the processing is carried at a third party, the privacy is compromised. Thus, such applications require a system where the data processing is done without actually knowing the data. Homomorphic Encryption (HE) is one such solution to this problem where, the encrypted data is processed at the third-party level without performing decryption. It provides secured data communication between sender(s) and receiver by preserving privacy. It not only assures privacy but also avoids multiple decryption operations to perform data processing. Nevertheless, one of the challenges in this system is to guarantee the authenticity of the data requester. This can be accomplished using authentication protocols over HE. This paper proposes an Authentication Protocol over a Partial Homomorphic Encryption (PHE) system for healthcare data. The patient data is processed at cloud in encryption domain and the results are sent to the data requester on proving one’s authenticity. This ensures both privacy of the information and authenticity of the data requester.