Homomorphic Encryption: The ‘Holy Grail’ for Big Data Analytics & Legal Compliance in the Pharmaceutical and Healthcare Sector?

Abstract

The pharmaceutical and healthcare sector is a number one target for cybercriminals around the world. These cyber-attacks represent significant challenges in the context of data protection and data security. The General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR) imposes strict rules regarding the processing and analysis of personal data. In conventional approaches, data analysts request data from various sources. Then, they anonymise or pseudonymise the data using various tools and techniques. These methods often use powerful algorithms to ensure a high level of security. However, these methods tend to either reduce the quality of data for further analysis or they expose the data again while decrypting it for analysis. Homomorphic Encryption (HE) has recently been touted as the ‘Holy Grail’ of cryptography since it allows the analysis of big data without ever needing to decrypting and thus compromising the confidentiality of the data. This provides a whole new layer of protection and at the same time allows the processing of data for secondary use and scientific research. While HE is not a new technology, it is still in its early stages of development. In this piece, we introduce a new automated tool for searching and analysing the encrypted data using HE techniques, which is being developed within the scope of the EnergyShield project.

Keywords: homomorphic encryption (HE), GDPR, data protection, data security, healthcare and pharmaceutical sector, big data analytics, cloud computing, algorithms, encryption, noise