Method of patients’ data protection on the instance of chemotherapy dosing data for Ewing's sarcoma treatment⋆ Yurii Baryshev1 and Vladyslava Lanova2,* 1,2 Vinnytsia National Technical University, 95 Khmelnytske shose, Vinnytsia, 21021, Ukraine Abstract The method of patients’ data protection on the instance of chemotherapy dosing data calculation process for Ewing's sarcoma treatment which improves the protection of personal data of cancer patients is proposed in this article. While performing this work, the types of homomorphic encryption, their features and examples of applications for this subject area were analyzed. After analyzing the known solutions, it was decided to develop method which combines homomorphic encryption with a distributed data storage such as blockchain. The instance of proposed method’s implementation is presented. At the end of the work, we draw conclusions and set tasks for the future research in this area. Keywords Cyber security, cryptography, homomorphic encryption, smart contract, blockchain, medical data protection, critical infrastructure. 1. Introduction The need for personal data protection of patients is relevant everywhere. In Ukraine, the Law on Personal Data Protection [1] establishes key principles for safeguarding personal information, including healthcare-related data. This law requires that healthcare organizations ensure the integrity, availability, and confidentiality of patient data. Compliance with laws and regulations, such as the General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR) [2] in the European Union and the Health Insurance Portability and Accountability Act (HIPAA) [3] in the United States, is essential. These regulations establish high standards for the data protection, requiring healthcare organizations to implement measures to safeguard patient confidentiality. Nowadays, the number of cancer patients is increasing, and each patient requires an individual approach to treatment. Nowadays, patients often move, which can lead to the risk of losing critical health data. For instance, the war in Ukraine has resulted in a significant number of internal refugees. These individuals may face challenges in maintaining consistent medical records, which can affect their treatment. To solve these problems, it is important to implement data protection, including encryption of patients’ personal data. Encrypting patient data ensures that even if records are transferred or accessed from different locations, the information remains secure and protected from unauthorized access. However the usage of encryption making it more difficult to process data, because it is needed to be decrypted before making an alterations and re-encrypted afterwards for the storing at the media. ⋆ IDDM’24: 7th International Conference on Informatics & Data-Driven Medicine, November 14 - 16, 2024, Birmingham, UK ∗ Corresponding author. 1 Author contributed sections 1, 4, 5, 7, proofreading and general editing. 2 Author contributed sections 2, 3, 6, software implementation and paper formatting. yuriy.baryshev@vntu.edu.ua (Y. Baryshev); lanovaia02y@gmail.com (V. Lanova) 0000-0001-8324-8869 (Y. Baryshev); 0009-0007-4025-1866 (V. Lanova) © 2024 Copyright for this paper by its authors. Use permitted under Creative Commons License Attribution 4.0 International (CC BY 4.0). CEUR ceur-ws.org Workshop ISSN 1613-0073 Proceedings Known approaches for data storing uses databases, clouds and blockchain. However each of these approaches has drawbacks in comparison to others: databases lacking availability and integrity protection of the stored data; clouds needs secure connection and complete trust to the cloud provider, thus creating problems for information security compliance; blockchains aren’t designed for storing big data arrays and are open for all the peers for reading stored data, thus creating additional tasks for data privacy protection. The latter creates tasks of data protection improvement for the mediums. The goal of this study is to improve the protection of patients' personal data by using homomorphic encryption. To achieve the goal of this study, one should solve the following tasks: 1. Known approaches analysis. 2. Task formalization. 3. Data protection method development. 4. Software development. 5. Implementation results analysis. 6. Conclusion drawing. The main contribution of the research is method of homomorphic encryption utilization for the blockchain as a storage medium for patients’ data, which allow to avoid additional read/write operations in case of data updating. The structure of the paper is the following: section 2 contains preliminaries in order to cover the background of the research, section 3 is devoted to the state of the art analysis followed be task formalization presented in the section 4, the main results are presented at section 5, where proposed method is presented, and section 6, where its software implementation and use-case are shown, section 7 contains further discussion and conclusions of the research. 2. Preliminaries 2.1 Homomorphic encryption Homomorphic encryption is a form of encryption that allows computations to be performed on encrypted data without need to decrypting it beforehand. This is particularly valuable when sensitive data needs to remain confidential but still requires processing. In homomorphic encryption, an encrypted input produces an encrypted output that, when decrypted, matches the result of the operation as if it had been performed on the plaintext data [4]. There are two primary types of homomorphic encryption systems: 1. Partially homomorphic encryption [4]: these schemes allow only specific operations (either addition or multiplication) to be performed on the encrypted data. For example, Paillier encryption [5] supports additive homomorphism, meaning that we can perform additions on ciphertexts that correspond to the addition of plaintext values once decrypted, but for the multiplication one of the operands should be in the open form. 2. Fully homomorphic encryption [4]: extends the capabilities of partially homomorphic encryption by supporting arbitrary operations, including both addition and multiplication in encrypted form. Fully homomorphic encryption schemes can perform any kind of computations on encrypted data, making them extremely powerful but also computationally expensive and less practical for large-scale or time-sensitive tasks. 2.2 Paillier cryptosystem The example of partially homomorphic encryption is Paillier cryptosystem [6]. One of the advantages of the Paillier cryptosystem is its homomorphic property in combination with non-deterministic encryption due to the random number usage. The basic public key encryption scheme has three steps: Step 1. Generate a public key pair ( n , g ). To achieve this one needs to generate large prime numbers p and q of equal bit length. Then compute: n= p ⋅ q (1) ¿ Then one need to randomly generate g such as g ∈ Z n 2. Step 2. The private decryption key is (λ, μ). To achieve this one needs to compute λ as: λ=lcm ( p−1 , q−1 ), (2) where lcm ( . ) means least common multiple. Then is used to calculate the modular multiplicative inverse: −1 (3) μ=( L ( g λ mod n2 ) ) mod n , ( x−1 ) where the function L ( x )= (quotient of integer division). n Pick a random number r in the range 0