Tree parity machine guided patients’ privileged based secure sharing of electronic medical record: cybersecurity for telehealth during COVID-19

In the COVID-19 pandemic, telehealth plays a significant role in the e-healthcare. E-health security risks have also risen significantly with the rise in the use of telehealth. This paper addresses one of e-health’s key concerns, namely security. Secret sharing is a cryptographic method to ensure reliable and secure access to information. To eliminate the constraint that in the existing secret sharing schemes, this paper presents Tree Parity Machine (TPM) guided patients’ privileged based secure sharing. This is a new secret sharing technique that generates the shares using a simple mask based operation. This work considers addressing the challenges presents in the original secret sharing scheme. This proposed technique enhances the security of the existing scheme. This research introduces a concept of privileged share in which among k number of shares one share should come from a specific recipient (patient) to whom a special privilege is given to recreate the original information. In the absence of this privileged share, the original information cannot be reconstructed. This technique also offers TPM based exchange of secret shares to prevent Man-In-The-Middle-Attack (MITM). Here, two neural networks receive common inputs and exchange their outputs. In some steps, it leads to full synchronization by setting the discrete weights according to the specific rule of learning. This synchronized weight is used as a common secret session key for transmitting the secret shares. The proposed method has been found to produce attractive results that show that the scheme achieves a great degree of protection, reliability, and efficiency and also comparable to the existing secret sharing scheme.