Cloud-based Secure Data Storage in Healthcare using Elliptic Curve Cryptography

Abstract

The growth of cloud computing in the healthcare field has led to significant developments, but ensuring the confidentiality and protection of medical records such as electronic health records (EHRs) remains a major concern for healthcare service applications. In cloud computing, the basic authentication provided by most service providers is insufficient to ensure secure access to critical or sensitive resources. Moreover, most of the existing healthcare management systems are ineffective in handling a number of patient data, which leads to single points of failure. To address these issues, elliptic curve cryptography (ECC) with Curve25519 is utilized to enhance security in cloud storage, particularly within healthcare management systems. The ECC with Curve25519 is optimized for efficient and fast scalar multiplication, which reduces computational overhead and enhances performance. The curve parameters are selected to prevent vulnerabilities and ensure security against known attacks. Moreover, it is efficient in maintaining the integrity of patient records, which reduces storage and bandwidth requirements. The ECC with Curve25519 achieves lower Key-Gen, prove, verify, proving key size, and verification key size of 13.7 s, 48 s, 0.608 s, 13.27 Mb, and 123.70 Kb, respectively, in comparison with proxy re-encryption algorithm with zero-knowledge proof (ZKP).