Cryptography in practice
Sofia Singla, Navdeep Singh Sodhi · 2024
The healthcare industry requires enhanced data encryption mechanisms to secure sensitive data from any kind of unauthorised breaches. Cryptography is a process that successfully helps to encrypt data in a secure format using symmetric or asymmetric keys. Researchers have introduced different types of cryptography, such as lattice cryptography, identity-based cryptography, visual cryptography, and so on, to secure systems. Quantum cryptography, or lattice cryptography, has revolutionised cybersecurity by offering unparalleled protection to the healthcare sector, safeguarding it against cryptographic attacks. Identity-based cryptography provides both authentication and authorisation of data based on users’ roles and responsibilities. Visual cryptography involves encrypting visual data, such as text and images, into a different visual format so that upon successful decryption, it appears identical to the original visual data. Despite the use of advanced cryptography techniques, the healthcare industry continues to face life-threatening vulnerabilities that compromise patients’ confidentiality. This chapter presents a comparative analysis of lattice cryptography, identity-based cryptography, and visual cryptography methodologies proposed for the healthcare industry, focusing on the technologies used, performance parameters, and respective outcomes. Further, this comparative analysis is followed by a results analysis that highlights lattice cryptography&s;s performance in terms of computational and communication costs, identity-based cryptography&s;s performance based on security and communication time, and visual cryptography&s;s performance in terms of image quality and security. This analysis shows both positive and negative performance. It has been found that these methodologies require further improvement, and some future recommendations are discussed to ensure secure transmission of patients’ data and healthcare practitioners’ data across multiple healthcare institutions.