Forward Secure Digital Signature for Electronic Medical Records

The Technology Safeguard in Health Insurance Portability and Accountability Act (HIPAA) Title II has addressed a way to maintain the integrity and non-repudiation of Electronic Medical Record (EMR). One of the important cryptographic technologies is mentioned in the ACT is digital signature; however, the ordinary digital signature (e.g. DSA, RSA, GQ...) has an inherent weakness: if the key (certificate) is updated, than all signatures, even the ones generated before the update, are no longer trustworthy. Unfortunately, the current most frequently used digital signature schemes are categorized into the ordinary digital signature scheme; therefore, the objective of this paper is to analyze the shortcoming of using ordinary digital signatures in EMR and to propose a method to use forward secure digital signature to sign EMR to ensure that the past EMR signatures remain trustworthy while the key (certificate) is updated.