Secure Health Monitoring in the Cloud Using Homomorphic Encryption

Abstract

Extending cloud computing to medical software, where the hospitals rent the software from the provider sounds like a natural evolution for cloud computing. One problem with cloud computing, though, is ensuring the medical data privacy in applications such as long term health monitoring. Previously proposed solutions based on Fully Homomorphic Encryption (FHE) completely eliminate privacy concerns, but are extremely slow to be practical. Our key proposition in this paper is a new approach to applying FHE into the data that is stored in the cloud. Instead of using the existing circuit-based programming models, we propose a solution based on Branching Programs. While this restricts the type of data elements that FHE can be applied to, it achieves dramatic speed-up as compared to traditional circuit-based methods. Our claims are proven with simulations applied to real ECG data.