Secure Communication for Healthcare Using Homomorphic Encryption: A Comparative Study

Cryptography is a branch of engineering that deals with sending information in a secured manner [1,2]. In the traditional cryptography, the message to be encrypted is called as plain text and the encrypted information is called as cipher text. After the successful transmission of information in a secured manner, the receiver decrypts the information for further processing. However, some security sensitive applications like healthcare demands a higher degree of security. Advancements in the modern cryptographic systems facilitated to process data without actually decrypting it. This would overcome the possibility of a third party to leak the sensitive information, as third party like clouds are relied for processing the information. Homomorphic encryption is a special class of cryptography wherein the data is processed in the encrypted domain itself. This adds to degree of security assured and can be highly useful for privacy preserving applications like voting, rating, healthcare etc. In this paper we have made an attempt to study and compare three popular homomorphic encryption schemes where the data is encrypted and the processed in the encrypted domain.