Patient’s data privacy and security in mHealth applications: a Charles proxy-based recommendation

Mobile Health (mHealth) applications play an essential role in healthcare. The usage of mHealth apps is rapidly increasing, and it provides services, such as vitals, medication, and appointments, to patients and physicians. These apps significantly ease for patients to manage their health. Using sen...

Full description

Saved in:
Bibliographic Details
Published in:Soft computing (Berlin, Germany) Germany), 2023-12, Vol.27 (23), p.18165-18180
Main Authors: Rajput, Ahmed Raza, Masood, Isma, Tabassam, Almas, Aslam, Muhammad Shamrooz, ShaoYu, Zhang, Rajput, Mehreen Aslam
Format: Article
Language:English
Subjects:
Application of Soft Computing
Applications programs
Artificial Intelligence
Cellular telephones
Communication channels
Computational Intelligence
Control
Data integrity
Encryption
Engineering
Internet of Things
Literature reviews
Mathematical Logic and Foundations
Mechatronics
Patients
Physicians
Privacy
Robotics
Servers
Telemedicine
Citations: Items that this one cites
Items that cite this one
Online Access:Get full text
Tags: Add Tag
No Tags, Be the first to tag this record!
Description
Summary:Mobile Health (mHealth) applications play an essential role in healthcare. The usage of mHealth apps is rapidly increasing, and it provides services, such as vitals, medication, and appointments, to patients and physicians. These apps significantly ease for patients to manage their health. Using sensitive health information and communication channels by mHealth apps has potential privacy and security hazards for patient’s privacy and security. mHealth apps are primarily dependent on a remote server online. Someone can monitor, alter, and divert communication through public infrastructure. Many mHealth applications did not utilize any encryption method for client–server communication, making it an imminent risk for patients' data security and privacy. In this study, we proposed a framework to develop the mHealth application and apply the security parameters to reduce the risk of data breaches, such as data confidentiality, integrity, and availability. Also, the study aims to identify the transport layer security issues relevant to the client–server of mHealth apps. To test the health data subset of Android and iOS apps collected from their Play Store and evaluate client security by the Charles Proxy tool. At the end of the paper, we presented the principal results of how many apps have vulnerabilities concerned with transport security. We compared our results for the transport layer of SSL and TLS certificates and chipper suit strength to show the performance of our proposed framework.
ISSN:1432-7643
1433-7479
DOI:10.1007/s00500-023-09265-8