ENHANCING DATA PRIVACY AND SECURITY IN CLOUD HEALTHCARE SOLUTIONS USING ELLIPTIC CURVE CRYPTOGRAPHY (ECC)

Abstract

The rapid adoption of cloud computing in healthcare has revolutionized medical data management by providingscalability, interoperability, and remote access. The change has also increased privacy and security riskssimultaneously, particularly with the sensitive nature of patient health information and the proliferation of IoTbased medical devices. a secure and light-weight cloud healthcare model founded on Elliptic Curve Cryptography(ECC) for maintaining confidentiality and integrity of electronic health information entire lifecycle—collection,cloud storage and authorized retrieval.The architecture includes data encryption and decryption via ECC withRole-Based Access Control (RBAC) and HMAC for secure user authentication and communication. Performancemeasurement was performed with a publicly accessible Kaggle healthcare dataset, where real-world healthcaremonitoring conditions were emulated. Important metrics such as encryption time, decryption time, response time,and memory usage were measured. ECC-based system resulted in negligible cryptographic overheads: 15 msencryption time, 13 ms decryption time, and moderate 25 MB memory usage. Response time in multi-userenvironments was kept within reasonable boundaries (135 ms), pointing to real-time applicability. Experimentaloutcomes prove that ECC offers an excellent trade-off between computation efficiency and data security, mostappropriate for mobile and low-energy healthcare environments. In contrast to conventional cryptosystems likeRSA or AES, ECC achieves the same level of security with lower key sizes, which for embedded healthcare IoTis particularly suitable. This framework caters to regulatory compliance, insider attacks, and cloud storagevulnerabilities, providing a complete, secure, and efficient solution for contemporary cloud-based healthcareinfrastructures.