A Novel Homomorphic Approach for Preserving Privacy of Patient Data in Telemedicine

Globally, the surge in disease and urgency in maintaining social distancing has reawakened the use of telemedicine/telehealth. Amid the global health crisis, the world adopted the culture of online consultancy. Thus, there is a need to revamp the conventional model of the telemedicine system as per the current challenges and requirements. Security and privacy of data are main aspects to be considered in this era. Data-driven organizations also require compliance with regulatory bodies, such as HIPAA, PHI, and GDPR. These regulatory compliance bodies must ensure user data privacy by implementing necessary security measures. Patients and doctors are now connected to the cloud to access medical records, e.g., voice recordings of clinical sessions. Voice data reside in the cloud and can be compromised. While searching voice data, a patient’s critical data can be leaked, exposed to cloud service providers, and spoofed by hackers. Secure, searchable encryption is a requirement for telemedicine systems for secure voice and phoneme searching. This research proposes the secure searching of phonemes from audio recordings using fully homomorphic encryption over the cloud. It utilizes IBM’s homomorphic encryption library (HElib) and achieves indistinguishability. Testing and implementation were done on audio datasets of different sizes while varying the security parameters. The analysis includes a thorough security analysis along with leakage profiling. The proposed scheme achieved higher levels of security and privacy, especially when the security parameters increased. However, in use cases where higher levels of security were not desirous, one may rely on a reduction in the security parameters.