A cloud-based watermarking method for health data security

Abstract

Private health information once confined to local medical institutions is migrating onto the Internet as an Electronic Health Record (EHR) that is accessed by cloud computing. No matter where it is hosted, health data is subject to security breaches, privacy abuses, and access control violations. However, novel technologies have new vulnerabilities, and allow new mitigations. In this paper, we propose a watermarking method in the architecture of cloud computing, to mitigate the risks of insider disclosures. Our design and preliminary implementation are accomplished by exploiting the MapReduce mechanism in the cloudlet we built. Our evaluation shows that our proposal addresses all of the requirements of the Cloud Oriented Architecture (COA) framework of the Jericho Forum.