Robust user authentication model for securing electronic healthcare system using fingerprint biometrics

ABSTRACT

The emergence of electronic health or eHealth has revolutionized the healthcare industry to offer better healthcare services at a low and affordable cost. However, it still suffers from security and privacy issues in handling health information. The privacy and security issues in eHealth domain are mainly centered around user authentication, data integrity, data confidentiality, and patient privacy protection. Biometrics technology has considerable opportunities to cope with the above security problems by providing reliable and secure user authentication. However, due to the sensitive nature of health data, the most important challenge lies toward the development of an efficient security model that can guarantee data privacy and reliability, verifying that only authorized personnel can access their corresponding health data. In this paper, we present a comprehensive overview of biometrics applications in eHealth and propose a robust and efficient scheme for user verification using fingerprint biometrics in order to enhance privacy and security in eHealth information systems. Moreover, additional issues like system complexity and processing time related to the use of biometrics should be taken into consideration. We therefore, emphasize to reduce the computation cost in biometric matching. In this work, we use local minutie features for user authentication and employ a fast stereo matching algorithm to compare the minutiae features of the test (probe) fingerprint with the minutiae features extracted from the gallery fingerprints (fingerprint database) in order to verify a person. Experimental results show that the proposed scheme leads to a compromise between the computation efficiency and the accuracy of the verification process. We believe that, our proposed scheme could be employed in real-time applications.

KEYWORDS:

• Biometrics
• fingerprint verification
• user authentication
• access control
• security and privacy
• eHealth

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the authors.

Notes on contributors

Sharmin Jahan , first author, is a researcher assistant at the School of Computing and Mathematics, Charles Sturt University, Australia. Her research interest includes eHealth, Bioinformatics, Biostatistics, Cyber Security and health Security. Jahan received her B.Sc. (Honors) and MS (Research) degree in Biochemistry and Molecular Biology from Jahangirnagar University. She has published around 15 research articles in reputed journals and conference proceedings.

Mozammel Chowdhury , second co-author, is a doctoral researcher at the School of Computing and Mathematics, Charles Sturt University, Australia. Prior to this, Chowdhury was a faculty member at the Department of Computer Science and Engineering, Jahangirnagar University, Bangladesh. He has expertise in Computer Vision, Machine Intelligence, Image Analysis, Cyber-Security, Tele-health, E-learning and E-governance. Chowdhury received his BSc (Honors) and MS (Research) degree in Computer Science and Engineering from Jahangirnagar University. He has published around 40 research articles in reputed journals and conference proceedings. He is an editorial board member of some international and national journals.

Rafiqul Islam , third co-author, is a senior lecturer in the School of Computing and Mathematics and Leader of Cyber Security Research Area, Faculty of Business, at Charles Sturt University, Australia. Islam has expertise in Network & Information Security, Cyber-Security, Sensor Network and Machine Learning. He received his PhD and postdoctoral experience from Deakin University, Australia. Islam was a lead researcher on various research projects including several ARC funded projects. Islam published more than 90 refereed research papers. Islam is also editorial board member for an international journal and General Chair and Technical Program Committee (TPC) member of various international conferences. He is a member of the Institute of Electrical and Electronic Engineers (IEEE) and a founder member of Association of Accounting Technician (ATT).