Suitability of adopting S/MIME and OpenPGP email messages protocol to secure electronic medical records

Abstract

Security of Electronic medical records is one of the everyday concerns to the decision makers, governmental agencies, researchers and medical centres. Several funding agencies spend thousands or millions dollars to initiate new project aims to preserve the privacy of the patients and maintain the confidentiality of the EMR, the results of these projects developed several EMR security solutions. However, there are several (well-designed and standardized) security solutions developed for other applications such OpenPGP and S/MIME protocols that were originally developed for Email. OpenPGP and S/MIME protocols employ different architecture and algorithms to secure the email transmission. In this paper, a systematic review and analysis of both protocols OpenPGP and S/MIME is done. The result of analysis depicted that, the adoption of both protocols is applicable. In addition some suggestions are proposed to integrate different medical centres in order to achieve secure message exchange.