Secure Data Transmission Using MS- Extended 8-bit ASCII Character Set

Abstract

Cryptography plays a crucial role in providing security to the sensitive data and information such as medical data. One method to handle sensitive data when it needs to be transmitted from source to the destination is to encrypt the same. Traditionally, Hill Cipher is used to encrypt the data. which uses only 26 characters in English alphabet. So, it is vulnerable to any known plain text attack. Hill Cipher is modified by making use of a set of the 7 bit ASCII characters denoted by codes 0 to 127 in [1]. In the current approach a set of 256 ASCII characters called 8-bit extended ASCII set denoted by codes 0 to 255 are used by implementing interweaving and iteration. At each step of the iteration, interweaving is performed because of which the text undergoes many transformations before it becomes cipher text. In order to diagnose different diseases, the hospital has to share the patient information to the researchers. During such a transmission the data may be modified or hacked by the third party. As medical data is highly sensitive information it has to be encrypted to be secure. Medical records help patients to acquire appropriate and right treatment. If the medical records are modified the patients may receive false treatment and leads to wrong consequences. Since there is also a chance of leakage of medical records from a trusted agent also, so to prevent this, a concept called "adding fake objects" [8] is used which appear as realistic objects and thus helps in identifying the third party who leaked the data. If data is found in other sources like website by using the "agent guilty model" we may find the guilty agent who is responsible for leaking the sensitive data. In this work, we implement these concepts to provide security to medical records.