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Ephemeral pseudonym based de-identification system to reduce impact of inference attacks in healthcare information system

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Abstract

As healthcare data is extremely sensitive, it poses a risk of invading individuals' privacy if stored or exported without proper security measures. De-identification entails pseudonymization or anonymization of data, which are methods for temporarily or permanently removing an individual's identity. These methods are most suitable to keep user healthcare data private. Inference attacks are a commonly overlooked weakness of de-identification techniques. In this paper, I discuss a method for de-identifying Electronic Healthcare Records (EHR) using chained hashing to generate short-lived pseudonyms to reduce the impact of inference attacks, as well as a mechanism for re-identification based on information self-determination. It also removes the weaknesses of existing de-identification algorithms and resolve them by using appropriate real-time de-identification algorithm, Ephemeral Pseudonym Generation Algorithm (EPGA).

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. Department of IT, ABES Institute of Technology, Ghaziabad, 201009, UP, India

    Bipin Kumar Rai

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  1. Bipin Kumar Rai
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Correspondence to Bipin Kumar Rai.

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Appendix

Appendix

T    Relation containing all patients

D    Relation containing all de-identification information of all patients

P    Relation containing pseudonyms for all patients

ti    Dith patient belonging to relation T

Ui    Basic identity information of ti

gi    Group ID of ti

gui    Unique ID in group for ti

Qti    List of Quasi Specifiers for ti

gQti    Generalized or suppressed list of Quasi Specifiers for ti

Egui    Ephemeral Unique ID in group for ti

Hi    Globally Unique ID for ti to map report IDs

RHi    Unique Global ID for ith report

Hm    Highly collision resistant Hashing algorithm

||    Concatenation Symbol

Ei    Ephemeral ID for ith report

HMAC    Hash based message authentication coding function

Kgi    Key for creating Hi through ith patient

EHR    Electronic Health Record

GDPR    General Data Protection Regulation

NGS    Next Generation Sequencing

PEK    Personal Key

GK    Global Key

HIPAA    Health Insurance Portability and Accountability Act

VRAHAD    Vast Re-identifiable Authentication-based Healthcare Associated Data-records

ECDHE    Elliptic Curve Diffie-Hellman Ephemeral

EPGA    Ephemeral Pseudonym Generation Algorithm

EPGA-D    Ephemeral Pseudonym Generation Algorithm De-identification

EPGA-R    Ephemeral Pseudonym Generation Algorithm Re-identification

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Rai, B.K. Ephemeral pseudonym based de-identification system to reduce impact of inference attacks in healthcare information system. Health Serv Outcomes Res Method 22, 397–415 (2022). https://doi.org/10.1007/s10742-021-00268-2

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  • DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s10742-021-00268-2

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