Morton Filter-Based Security Mechanism for Healthcare System in Cloud Computing

Abstract

Electronic health records contain the patient’s sensitive information. If these data are acquired by a malicious user, it will not only cause the pilferage of the patient’s personal data but also affect the diagnosis and treatment. One of the most challenging tasks in cloud-based healthcare systems is to provide security and privacy to electronic health records. Various probabilistic data structures and watermarking techniques were used in the cloud-based healthcare systems to secure patient’s data. Most of the existing studies focus on cuckoo and bloom filters, without considering their throughputs. In this research, a novel cloud security mechanism is introduced, which supersedes the shortcomings of existing approaches. The proposed solution enhances security with methods such as fragile watermark, least significant bit replacement watermarking, class reliability factor, and Morton filters included in the formation of the security mechanism. A Morton filter is an approximate set membership data structure (ASMDS) that proves many improvements to other data structures, such as cuckoo, bloom, semi-sorting cuckoo, and rank and select quotient filters. The Morton filter improves security; it supports insertions, deletions, and lookups operations and improves their respective throughputs by 0.9× to 15.5×, 1.3× to 1.6×, and 1.3× to 2.5×, when compared to cuckoo filters. We used Hadoop version 0.20.3, and the platform was Red Hat Enterprise Linux 6; we executed five experiments, and the average of the results has been taken. The results of the simulation work show that our proposed security mechanism provides an effective solution for secure data storage in cloud-based healthcare systems, with a load factor of 0.9. Furthermore, to aid cloud security in healthcare systems, we presented the motivation, objectives, related works, major research gaps, and materials and methods; we, thus, presented and implemented a cloud security mechanism, in the form of an algorithm and a set of results and conclusions.

A lightweight and robust authentication scheme for the healthcare system using public cloud server

“…However, their scheme doesn’t fulfil all the security functionalities for participants. Bhatia and Malhotra [ 7 ] proposed a scheme based on Morton filters using cloud computing. They claimed that most of the security schemes for patient diagnosis are designed on cuckoo or bloom filters, which suffer from security and privacy issues.…”

“…Patients’ concerns about losing their privacy are a significant hurdle to adopting cloud-based healthcare systems since they may feel uneasy and lack confidence in the service providers to keep their identities a secret. The transmission of patient information through an insecure internet needs to be secure, and patient privacy is preserved [ 7 ]. Thus, a public cloud server’s stored medical information system needs a strong authentication technique to protect accessibility, confidence, and authenticity [ 8 ].…”

A critical review of the state of computer security in the health sector

“…However, cloud security has vulnerabilities to computer attacks; to address this, they recommend combining it with blockchain technology. Meanwhile, Bhatia and Malhotra [56], strengthen security in the cloud with mechanisms for secure storage of data in health systems, which replace the shortcomings of existing approaches to conventional cloud security. Moreover, Al-Zumia et al [57], consider that cloud computing offers advantages in terms of having powerful computing capabilities and large storage resources.…”