A survey of state-of-the-art methods for securing medical databases

Abstract

This review article presents a survey of recent work devoted to advanced state-of-the-art methods for securing of medical databases. We concentrate on three main directions, which have received attention recently: attribute-based encryption for enabling secure access to confidential medical databases distributed among several data centers; homomorphic encryption for providing answers to confidential queries in a secure manner; and privacy-preserving data mining used to analyze data stored in medical databases for verifying hypotheses and discovering trends. Only the most recent and significant work has been included.

Keywords

• medical databases
• privacy and security
• attribute-based encryption
• homomorphic encryption
• privacy preserving data mining