Ensuring patients' privacy in a cryptographic-based-electronic health records using bio-cryptography

Several recent works have proposed and implemented cryptography as a means to preserve privacy and security of patient's health data. Nevertheless, the weakest point of electronic health record (EHR) systems that relied on these cryptographic schemes is key management. Thus, this paper presents the development of privacy and security system for cryptography-based-EHR by taking advantage of the uniqueness of fingerprint and iris characteristic features to secure cryptographic keys in a bio-cryptography framework. The results of the system evaluation showed significant improvements in terms of time efficiency of this approach to cryptographic-based-EHR. Both the fuzzy vault and fuzzy commitment demonstrated false acceptance rate (FAR) of 0%, which reduces the likelihood of imposters gaining successful access to the keys protecting patients' protected health information. This result also justifies the feasibility of implementing fuzzy key binding scheme in real applications, especially fuzzy vault which demonstrated a better performance during key reconstruction.