A comprehensive study on the security of medical information using encryption

The exponential rise in the use of the Internet and rapid progress in computer technology has revolutionised healthcare allowing medical information to be shared efficiently across networks. While these advancements make it convenient to store and share information, they also have their limitations. Medical data contain highly sensitive and confidential information about patients and can be subjected to various kinds of passive and active attacks and analyses if transferred over an insecure network. These data leakages can be catastrophic for the respective individual or organisation due to the undesirable scenarios which emanate from them. Hence, information security is a major concern and warrants developing techniques to securely transfer medical data. This chapter discusses information security techniques and their properties in detail, reviews the research related to cryptography-based medical information security by categorising the techniques into traditional, hybrid and deep learning-based approaches and highlights their limitations. Comparative studies based on the universality of the method and metric-wise performance are also presented. We further discuss the potential challenges and prospective future directions, enabling a path forward to advance the research in this area.