End-to-end Encryption for SMS Messages in the Health Care Domain

The health care domain has a high level of expectation on security and privacy of patient information. The security, privacy, and confidentiality issues are consistent all over the domain. Technical development and increasing use of mobile phones has led us to a situation in which SMS messages are used in the electronic interactions between health care professionals and patients. We will show that it is possible to send, receive and store text messages securely with a mobile phone with no additional hardware required. More importantly we will show that it is possible to obtain a reliable user authentication in systems using text message communication. Programming language Java is used for realization of our goals. This paper describes the general application structure, while details for the technical implementation and encryption methods are described in the referenced articles. We also propose some crucial areas where the implementation of encrypted SMS can solve previous lack of security.