Data Security in Healthcare: Confidential Data Search
The Role of Data in Healthcare
Cybercriminals highly value and actively seek out Protected Health Information (PHI) and Electronic Health Records (EHRs), which contain a wealth of personal and medical information, including patients’ names, addresses, medical history, diagnoses, and treatment plans. They can exploit this data for financial gain, identity theft, insurance fraud, and other malicious purposes.
Healthcare organizations need data search capability in their databases for various reasons. They need quick access to data and to manage and analyze patient information while ensuring compliance with regulatory requirements and patient privacy. The data analysis helps organizations improve patient care, research outcomes, and operational efficiency.
Here are some key situations where data search capability is essential.
- Organizations can retrieve relevant information, such as diagnostic reports or medication histories, to support patient care decisions.
- Researchers can analyze large datasets, identifying patterns, trends, and correlations that can inform medical research and innovation.
- Organizations can identify high-risk patients, track health trends, and assess the effectiveness of interventions through analysis of population-level health data.
- They can quickly locate and audit patient data, ensuring that data access is authorized, and privacy safeguards are in place.
- Administrative teams can use it for operational tasks, such as scheduling appointments, processing insurance claims, and managing inventory.
The Need for Pervasive Encryption
Encryption converts into a code or cipher, rendering it unreadable to unauthorized parties. This process employs cryptographic algorithms and keys to secure data, ensuring that only authorized parties with the correct decryption key can access and read it. Even if intercepted or stolen by cybercriminals, encrypted data remains useless to them.
Pervasive encryption refers to encrypting data at every stage of its lifecycle, whether stored, processed, or transmitted. This means that data is encrypted not only when it’s being transferred over networks but also when it’s stored on servers or in databases and even when applications or algorithms are processing it.
The goal of pervasive encryption is to ensure that data remains protected and unreadable by unauthorized parties throughout its journey, from creation to deletion. By encrypting data persistently and consistently, even if a breach were to occur, the stolen data would be rendered useless without the encryption keys required to decrypt it.
Pervasive encryption is increasingly seen as a critical component of comprehensive data protection strategies, especially in industries involving sensitive or regulated information, such as finance, government, and healthcare.
Introducing Fortanix Confidential Data Search
A groundbreaking solution for searching encrypted data. Powered by Confidential Computing technology, this innovative solution enables businesses to conduct encrypted searches within encrypted databases, ensuring both data and search processes remain highly secure. Sensitive patient data remains securely encrypted at rest, in transit, and in use.
Fortanix offers robust encryption capabilities across hybrid and multi-cloud environments.
The original database, safeguarded by Transparent Data Encryption and/or tokenization, can be replicated into a Secure Enclave to protect the memory-in-use. Within this enclave, the database client operates, with all transactions monitored by role-based access control (RBAC) policies from the unified Fortanix Data Security Manager platform. This platform also offers secure key management and stores encryption keys in FIPS 140–2 Level 3 validated Hardware Security Modules (HSMs).
Unlike existing solutions, which are impractical for general adoption due to their slow performance and limited query granularity, Fortanix Confidential Data Search allows organizations to accelerate their data-driven initiatives by providing faster search capabilities on complex datasets.
With Fortanix Confidential Data Search, organizations benefit from comprehensive end-to-end data protection while retaining standard databases’ performance and search capabilities.
Conclusion
Fortanix Data Security Manager is closely aligned with the principles of pervasive encryption, which emphasize the comprehensive protection of data across all stages of its lifecycle.
The innovative Confidential Data Search feature improves the security and granularity of data searches on encrypted data, addressing a common challenge in healthcare data analytics.
This ensures that patient information remains protected even during data processing and analysis, contributing to the broader goal of pervasive encryption within healthcare environments.
