IDHG-ECC-integrated Diffie Hellman Galois–elliptic-curve cryptography for enhancing EHR data security

Abstract

Electronic Health Records (EHRs), which are used in modern healthcare systems, store private medical histories for a large number of people. A strong security architecture is required to guarantee patient privacy within EHR databases due to the importance of preserving this personal data. Improving data security and patient privacy during the transfer of sensitive information across healthcare providers for diagnostic purposes is the main emphasis of this work. To enhance the security of electronic health record data, this article proposes a new approach that combines a decentralized, secure blockchain paradigm with a lightweight cryptosystem. The proposed workflow starts with gathering electronic health record data from databases and initializing user transaction information to facilitate communication across various nodes. Public and private keys are produced via an elliptic scheme to enhance the security of health data. Then, medical data is encrypted and decrypted using Integrated Diffie-Hellman Galois-Elliptic-curve Cryptography (IDHG-ECC). The encrypted data is further strengthened by using a consensus process known as Affinity-Propagation encased Practical Byzantine Fault Tolerance (AP-PBFT). Extra security is provided by storing the encrypted data on the off-chain Inter Planetary File System (OIPFS) blockchain. In the evaluation, the proposed model attains efficient encryption and decryption times of 7.88 s and 1.80 s, respectively, with a quick uploading time of 0 .09s. It achieves high transaction throughput (78,288 TPS) with low latency (0.71 s), while read throughput is 137.54 MB/s with minimal latency (0.01 s). CPU utilization is moderate at 20.70%, and memory utilization is 54.00%, ensuring balanced resource management for optimal performance.