Assessment of Cloud-based Health Monitoring using Homomorphic Encryption

Current financial and regulatory pressure has provided strong incentives to institute better disease prevention, improved patient monitoring, and push U.S. healthcare into the digital era. This transition requires that data privacy be ensured for digital health data in three distinct phases: I. acquisition, II. storage, and III. computation. Each phase comes with unique challenges in terms of proper implementation and privacy. While the privacy of the data can be ensured with existing AES encryption techniques in phases I (acquisition) and II (storage), to enable healthcare organizations to take advantage of cloud computing using resources such as Amazon Web Services, phase III (computation) must also enable the privacy of the data. Currently, there exists no system to enable direct computation in the cloud while assuring data privacy. Fully Homomorphic Encryption (FHE) is an emerging cryptographic technique to permit computation on encrypted data directly in the cloud without the need to bring the data back to the computational node. However, this promising technique comes with significant performance-and storage-related challenges. While it will take more years before true FHE is mainstream, we provide a feasibility study for its application to a simple long-term patient ECG-data monitoring system.