MATHEMATICALLY ENHANCED LIGHTWEIGHT CRYPTOGRAPIC HASH FUNCTIONS FOR DIGITAL MEDICAL DATA SECURITY IN CLOUD

Abstract

The protection of data within healthcare cloud is paramount to safeguard data and users’ privacy, maintain data authenticity and prevent unlawful users’ access. There are numerous issues and concerns that are associated with health care systems that are cloud based, and some of the major ones include; Cyber security; this is because cloud systems are prone to attacks such as; hacking, leakage of information and other unauthorized accesses to patients’ data and information. Most of the existing conventional cryptographic methods are costly in terms of computational power and hence not suitable for low resource environment. The current techniques may not provide enough protection against new forms of attacks including collision and preimage attacks which may result to major problems like tampering and forging of data. Such challenges call for an optimized security solution that corresponds to the needs of cloud-based medical data management. This paper proposes an extensible and secure design of the framework which employs mathematically altered lightweight cryptographic hash functions for protecting digital medical information over cloud networks. This framework provides greater data privacy when compared to the normal approach and the computational cost is very small, which is very suitable for real-world healthcare applications that need efficient data management solutions.