Secure Healthcare Data Processing using Homomorphic Encryption

With the increasing demand in processing big data, cloud computing has become increasingly popular in recent past. Various sectors, including educational institutions, industries, and hospitals, utilize cloud storage to manage their vast amounts of data efficiently. Additionally, cloud technology facilitates optimal resource utilization, as well as multiparty access and computation. However, secure data privacy, secure data communication, and secure data processing become crucial when data is stored in the cloud. Traditional encryption algorithms provide robust data privacy and are lightweight. Nevertheless, when operations need to be performed on stored data, it must first be decrypted, then processed and finally re-encrypted. This process can expose raw data to third-party cloud providers, which is unacceptable in scenarios where data privacy is paramount. Homomorphic Encryption (HE) preserves data privacy by enabling operations to be carried out directly on encrypted data. In this paper, we present a detailed survey of HE for healthcare applications. We propose a secure outsourced processing protocol for medical applications that uses HE for secure data processing. Simulation results compare the performance of Paillier and BGV algorithms for the proposed framework.