Biblio

Preserving medical data is of utmost importance to stake holders. There are not many laws in India about preservation, usability of patient records. When data is transmitted across the globe there are chances of data getting tampered intentionally or accidentally. Tampered data loses its authenticity for diagnostic purpose, research and various other reasons. This paper proposes an authenticity based ECDSA algorithm by signature verification to identify the tampering of medical image files and alerts by the rules of authenticity. The algorithm can be used by researchers, doctors or any other educated person in order to maintain the authenticity of the record. Presently it is applied on medical related image files like DICOM. However, it can support any other medical related image files and still preserve the authenticity.

Medical organizations find it challenging to adopt cloud-based electronic medical records services, due to the risk of data breaches and the resulting compromise of patient data. Existing authorization models follow a patient centric approach for EHR management where the responsibility of authorizing data access is handled at the patients' end. This however creates a significant overhead for the patient who has to authorize every access of their health record. This is not practical given the multiple personnel involved in providing care and that at times the patient may not be in a state to provide this authorization. Hence there is a need of developing a proper authorization delegation mechanism for safe, secure and easy cloud-based EHR management. We have developed a novel, centralized, attribute based authorization mechanism that uses Attribute Based Encryption (ABE) and allows for delegated secure access of patient records. This mechanism transfers the service management overhead from the patient to the medical organization and allows easy delegation of cloud-based EHR's access authority to the medical providers. In this paper, we describe this novel ABE approach as well as the prototype system that we have created to illustrate it.