Design and Development of Message Authentication Process for Telemedicine Application

Abstract

The delivery of healthcare benefits remotely by utilizing high tech is called telemedicine. One specific use of telemedicine refers to the electronic communication channel between doctors and patients. Amongst others are the transfers, exchanges of medical images between heath care professions. Doctors and patients electronic message communication contain sensitive information and therefore the message transmission in telemedicine applications and systems must be secured. Two of the fundamental purposes of security are data integrity and message authentication, which are strongly associated with cryptography. Data integrity and ensuring that the receiver can verify that the data came from the sender can be achieved by Message Authentication Code. The objectives of this research are to ensure, investigate and highlight data integrity and message authentication as information security goals in telemedicine application, and to implement a secure messages authentication code for telemedicine application. We optimized SHA2 algorithm for MAC construction with implementation in Java. Using two similar MAC tags, the patient safely assumes the message came from the doctor (authentication) and that the message was not modified or altered during transmission (message integrity). We came to the conclusion that data integrity and message authentication are crucial components for doctor-patient message electronic communication.