Open Access

ARTICLE

Securing Electronic Health Records with Cryptography and Lion Optimization

Arkan Kh Shakr Sabonchi^*

Department of Mathematics, Open Educational College, Kirkuk Branch, Kirkuk, 36001, Iraq

* Corresponding Author: Arkan Kh Shakr Sabonchi. Email:

Journal of Cyber Security 2025, 7, 21-43. https://doi.org/10.32604/jcs.2025.059645

Received 14 October 2024; Accepted 21 January 2025; Issue published 18 February 2025

Abstract

With the internet and modern mobile technologies, health-related information is readily available, and thus, the security aspect of health information is at great risk. Confidentiality and protection of medical information regarding patients are of prime concern in the context of sharing such data with different healthcare providers. On one hand, Electronic Health Record Systems (EHRS) and online sites have proved to be hassle-free ways of exchanging medical information between health professionals. On the other hand, data security issues remain a concern. The proposed paper presents an improvement in the security mechanism of EHRS by utilizing the Lion Optimization Algorithm (LOA) and the Secure Hash Algorithm (SHA-256) algorithm, which is a better security mechanism, and elliptic curve cryptography. This design will use LOA for the generation of an Elliptic Curve Cryptography (ECC) private key to improve the security of data storage in EHRs. The design will be further justified by comparing the encoding and decoding time against the other techniques such as ECC-GA-SHA-256. The results depict that the proposed model indeed gives faster encoding and decoding times. It also outperforms other encryption methods, as it presents encoding and decoding times higher by more than 18.89% when compared to those methods. This means there is great potential for the proposed approach to boost both the security and performance of EHRS. That is, this work could be one of the effective solutions to the security-related challenges of the EHR systems, as it was designed using LOA with SHA-256 and ECC.

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Keywords

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