Anonymity and Privacy Preserving Service for Mobile Healthcare Technology

Background:The purpose of providing mobile healthcare services is to provide appropriate conditions for patient monitoring their health status. In this article, Tor hidden service technology, which is one of the results of the Tor project, has been used to increase the confidentiality and security of information in this area. Considering the issues raised in the context of the confidentiality of users’ information in mobile healthcare technology, using a scenario similar to the scenario presented in the Tor hidden service, information privacy can be enhanced in the provision of facilities. For this purpose, the information exchanged between the patient and the provider of medical services is encrypted. Therefore, the patient s identity and sensitive and secure information cannot be available for an eavesdropper in the network traffic. Hidden services provide anonymity for patients at their destination. The patients tend to be anonymous at the destination and this anonymity helps to increase the quality of the healthcare services. As a result, healthcare technology, combined with the use of the hidden service scenario presented in this article, can improve the level of information security and confidentiality of users can more effectively and more efficiently serve patients.Material and Methods:Some patients are embarrassed to share their private health issues and difficulties share their information with doctors directly and they prefer to remain anonymous. Therefore, anonymous access to mobile healthcare services is also an important factor that must be preserved.Hidden services are comprised of a service provider and a client who uses this service. Tor hidden service, which is a part of Tor project, allows access to a web service without revealing where the web service is. A hidden service is usually accessed through its onion address with a Tor browser and a user can access this hidden service provider via a Tor browser.In order to improve the anonymity of users in healthcare services, we propose to use a system based on Tor hidden service. A patient can access to a Healthcare Service Provider (HSP) by a web browser in his mobile device. This HSP is designed based on Tor hidden service. HSP is placed in deep web so it is not directly accessible via search engines. Only patients that have access to the Public HSP key via a predesigned web browser can use these services which are provided by HSP. The exchanged information between the patient and the HSP are encrypted; therefore, user’s identities and sensitive information is not accessible by an eavesdropper which snoops the traffic. Moreover, a patient cannot be identified in the destination and the privacy and anonymity of the patient can be preserved. Deep web is used to design this service and we can share information anonymously. Therefore, healthcare services can be presented to patients with high security.Results:Proposed mobile healthcare technology based on Tor hidden network is a solution to patients’ privacy and security threats. Hidden services allow mobile healthcare services to be used over the Tor network in which the HSP does not know who the patient is. The client’s browser provides a massage encryption with the public key of the hidden service and some information about itself. This design makes it difficult for an attacker to sense or track a healthcare hidden service. There are several onion routers which transfer encrypted information. These onion routers are chosen randomly therefore patients’ behavior cannot be disclosed by third parties, too. Healthcare services can receive patients’ sensitive information but they are unable to trace the patient’s identity. Therefore, the patient’s privacy is protected in the mobile healthcare technology.Conclusion:In this paper, we propose to use Tor hidden service to preserve patients’ sensitive and secure information in mobile healthcare services. Hidden services of deep web provide the anonymity of the patients in the destination. As a result, the hidden service can improve the level of security and privacy of users, and mobile healthcare technology and it can be optimized and more practical to serve patients. Using our healthcare service will pave the way for preserving the patients’ identity and secure information for future mobile healthcare systems with high reliability and security.

کلیدواژه ها:

Privacy ، security ، Tor hidden service ، mobile healthcare ، anonymity