Light weight encryption technique: a cellular automaton based approach for securing health records

Digitization has led to enormous data generation that needs to be maintained and shared regularly across different platforms. The healthcare industry strives on this enormous data sharing as it forms the backbone of the industry. But such large platforms always face security concerns in terms of privacy preservation and unauthorized access. To overcome this, a robust encryption mechanism is needed to ensure smooth sharing facility but another consideration is the complexity involved in the encryption process. Although many encryption techniques exist, the need of the present situation is to shift to light weight encryption techniques to facilitate quick and efficient data protection schemes. The paper introduces an ultra light weight encryption technique based on the PRESENT algorithm coupled with cellular automaton to provide an added benefit in key generation. The algorithm has been tested on some benchmark tests like the NIST test suite and Diehard test to show its efficacy.