An Improved Time-Based Encryption Key Rotation Scheme for Healthcare Databases
Ellie Pin-Yu Chen, Quincy Wu, Meng-Shuo Shen · 2023
The practice of encrypting sensitive and critical data has led to the development of many mature cryptosystems that almost guarantee the confidentiality of encrypted data. However, many organizations still suffer security issues caused by poor key management. Some scenarios indicate that encryption keys have not been changed for several years. In that case, former employees still possess valid keys to access the system. Many systems adopt key rotation as countermeasures, but it is difficult to find a balance between security and efficiency. This paper shares the experience in Puli Christian Hospital with key rotation by proposing an improved algorithm with enhanced security and higher performance over a previous time-based key rotation system. It is demonstrated that the new mechanism is more suitable for healthcare database systems to store sensitive data.