The criticality of securing medical data cannot be overstated. Healthcare providers handle vast swathes of highly sensitive patient information, from medical history data and diagnoses to treatment plans and other personally identifiable information.
In the wrong hands, this can be used in a number of nefarious ways, be it fraudulent insurance claims, identity theft, or even to adversely affect a specific patient’s health and privacy.
Unfortunately, patient data breaches happen regularly, often on a catastrophic scale. In July 2023, for example, HCA Healthcare revealed that 1,000 hospitals had been affected by a data breach in which up to 11 million patients may have had their data stolen.
With digital supply chains becoming increasingly complex and cybercrime continually ramping up, it’s never been more important for healthcare providers to properly protect patient data. And today, thankfully, there are solutions available on the market capable of providing significant support in achieving this.
What is FHE?
Enter Fully Homomorphic Encryption (FHE) – an emerging, revolutionary technological advancement poised to fortify data privacy and potentially propel the healthcare sector into a new era of secure information sharing and analysis.
In simple terms, FHE enables encrypted data to be processed blindly – a critical capability in healthcare, given that 65% of healthcare breaches in H1 2023 stemmed from network servers.
Let’s consider the process behind FHE, step-by-step:
- The user encrypts its data and sends it to a server for processing.
- The server processes this encrypted data blindly, without ever having access to the decryption key.
- The result that is subsequently produced is readily encrypted and returned to the user.
- The user receives these results and decrypts them.
From the user’s point of view, nothing changes – they send data, and receive a response. However, the key difference lies in the fact that the data is encrypted in transit and while being processed, with the result also being produced in encrypted form. In other words, all data is encrypted end-to-end.
With FHE, nobody can see your data but you. Governments, hackers, and even the company providing the service can’t access it because they don’t have your decryption key. They also can’t break it, as the type of encryption used in FHE is state-of-the art secure and can even resist quantum computing.
In this sense, FHE is a groundbreaking cryptographic technique that enables computations to be performed on encrypted data without the need for decryption, safeguarding sensitive information throughout its lifecycle.
How can Fully Homomorphic Encryption help in healthcare?
In the context of healthcare, FHE offers a robust solution to the longstanding challenge of balancing data utility with patient privacy.
Medical institutions can now collaborate seamlessly by conducting complex analyses on encrypted patient data, eliminating the need to expose sensitive details during information exchange. Equally, researchers can glean insights from large datasets without breaching confidentiality, thus accelerating medical breakthroughs.
FHE also empowers individuals to retain control over their personal health data. Patients can securely share encrypted information with healthcare providers, enabling accurate diagnoses and tailored treatments without compromising their privacy. This engenders trust between patients and the healthcare system, encouraging active participation in managing one’s health.
Further, adopting FHE addresses regulatory concerns, such as compliance with data protection laws like GDPR and HIPAA. By ensuring that data remains encrypted during processing, FHE helps healthcare organisations navigate complex legal frameworks while harnessing data for innovative research and analytics.
Exploring FHE’s applicative potential
These benefits capture the immense potential FHE presents to the healthcare sector, offering advanced levels of security to ensure the confidentiality and integrity of patients’ sensitive medical data.
With that said, some challenges regarding its deployment remain. FHE can be somewhat computationally intensive, for example, while continued research and collaboration between cryptography and computer science experts will be crucial to optimise FHE implementations for real-world healthcare scenarios.
However, we’re already seeing FHE’s medical potential come to life. At Zama, we’ve taken significant strides towards demonstrating the technology’s practical application in this domain through a demo that’s currently available on Hugging Face.
Here, patient symptoms can be submitted by a healthcare provider in an encrypted format, with a machine learning model then sending back a predicted diagnosis that can then be decrypted by the healthcare provider.
While this example remains in the demo stage, it gives a practical view of how FHE operates, serving as a prototype for future applications by demonstrating its ability to handle complex computations without compromising on data confidentiality.
Immense promise for healthcare data security
Indeed, this combination is key.
According to the HHS Office for Civil Rights (OCR) data breach portal, the healthcare sector suffered 295 breaches in the first half of 2023 alone, with more than 39 million individuals having been implicated.
Further, IBM’s Cost of a Data Breach Report 2023 reveals that the healthcare industry experiences the highest average data breach costs of all, now standing at $10.93 million (up 53.3% in just three years).
The business case for embracing FHE in healthcare – a tool designed to safeguard sensitive information throughout its lifecycle – is, therefore, clear.
As a groundbreaking cryptographic technique that enables computations to be performed on encrypted data without the need for decryption, it can play a key role in mitigating data breaches. At Zama, we expect to witness a wide adoption of FHE in healthcare services in the years to come, and this paradigm will profoundly change the way patient data is handled and processed.
From accelerating medical research to enhancing patient care and establishing a new paradigm of trust and confidentiality in the healthcare landscape, FHE holds immense promise for the future of data security in the healthcare sector.
About the auhtor
Dr Pascal Paillier, CTO at Zama, is a researcher and entrepreneur in cryptography. He has spent the past 25 years inventing new cryptographic techniques for critical industries. From embedded security to whitebox crypto to homomorphic encryption, he has contributed to ground-breaking research in corporate environments. In addition to being the famed inventor of the Paillier cryptosystem, Pascal is one of the most widely cited authors in fully homomorphic encryption with more than 12,000 citations.
