High-speed and secure encryption schemes based on chinese remainder theorem for storage and transmission of medical information

Abstract

Medical records generated in hospitals often contain private and sensitive information. This privileged information must be prevented from falling into wrong hands. Thus, there is a strong need for developing a secure cryptographic scheme that can be adapted to use in conjunction with transmission and storage of medical information. Previous approaches have proposed the use of the advanced encryption standard (AES) algorithm for this purpose. In this article, we are proposing a new robust, high-speed, and secure cryptographic scheme that has the added advantage of being immune to side-channel attacks. In our article, we have shown that the performance of this scheme is superior in certain aspects to that of the A5/1 system used in global system for mobile (GSM) systems. The parallel architecture employed in this scheme makes it suitable to use in systems where the data-processing operations have to be carried out in real time. Residue number systems (RNS) based on Chinese remainder theorem (CRT) permits the representation of large integers in terms of combinations of smaller ones. The set of all CRT number system representation of an integer from 0 to M-1 with component wise modular addition and multiplication constitutes a direct sum of smaller commutative rings. An encryption and decryption algorithm based on the properties of direct sum of smaller rings offers distinct advantages over decimal or fixed radix arithmetic. We have utilized the representation of integers using CRT to successfully design additive, multiplicative, and affine stream cipher systems. The use of number system based on CRT allows speeding up the encryption/decryption algorithms, reduces the time complexity, and provides immunity to side-channel, algebraic, and known plain text attacks. In this article, the characteristics of additive, multiplicative, and affine stream cipher systems based on CRT number system representation have been studied and analyzed. 2010 World Scientific Publishing Company.