Home // eTELEMED 2014, The Sixth International Conference on eHealth, Telemedicine, and Social Medicine // View article
Authors:
Uwe Roth
Keywords: patient privacy-enhancing technologies; secure patient data storage; pseudonymisation; one-way function; primitive root.
Abstract:
Pseudonyms are used in medical data to protect the privacy of patients: Demographics like name, gender and age are removed from the medical data and are replaced by a unique pseudonym. Medical data with the same pseudonym belongs to the same person. A pseudonym should be random or at least pseudo-random and should not allow drawing conclusions about the identity of the patient. Random pseudonyms are not always possible and therefore must be somehow calculated out of an identifier of the patient, e.g., by hashing or encrypting the identifier of the patient. In this paper an alternative algorithm is proposed to calculate pseudonyms on the base of primitive roots. The algorithm guarantees a collision free pseudo-random distribution of the pseudonyms, but creates pseudonyms with a bit-depth that easily can be transformed to a human readable representation. This is important if the pseudonym has to be used (be read, be written) in a day-to-day workflow. The pseudonymisation algorithm acts as a one-way function if all of the calculation parameters are kept secret.
Pages: 111 to 115
Copyright: Copyright (c) IARIA, 2014
Publication date: March 23, 2014
Published in: conference
ISSN: 2308-4359
ISBN: 978-1-61208-327-8
Location: Barcelona, Spain
Dates: from March 23, 2014 to March 27, 2014