Towards the Uses of Blockchain in Mobile Health Services and Applications: A Survey <s> Security Mechanisms in M-Health <s> The last couple of years has seen a growing momentum towards using the Internet for conducting business. One of the key enablers for business applications is the ability to setup secure channels across the Internet. The Secure Sockets Layer (SSL) protocol provides this capability and it is the most widely used transport layer security protocol. In this paper we investigate the performance of SSL both from a latency as well as a throughput point of view. Since SSL is primarily used to secure Web transactions, we use the SPECWeb96 benchmark suitably modified for use with the SSL protocol. We benchmark two of the more popular Web servers that are in use today and find that they are a couple of orders of magnitude slower when it comes to serving secure Web pages. We investigate the reason for this deficiency by instrumenting the SSL protocol stack with a detailed profiling of the protocol processing components. Based on our findings we suggest two modifications to the protocol that reduce the latency as well as increase the throughput at the server. <s> BIB001 </s> Towards the Uses of Blockchain in Mobile Health Services and Applications: A Survey <s> Security Mechanisms in M-Health <s> Establishing identity is becoming critical in our vastly interconnected society. Questions such as "Is she really who she claims to be?," "Is this person authorized to use this facility?," or "Is he in the watchlist posted by the government?" are routinely being posed in a variety of scenarios ranging from issuing a driver's license to gaining entry into a country. The need for reliable user authentication techniques has increased in the wake of heightened concerns about security and rapid advancements in networking, communication, and mobility. Biometrics, described as the science of recognizing an individual based on his or her physical or behavioral traits, is beginning to gain acceptance as a legitimate method for determining an individual's identity. Biometric systems have now been deployed in various commercial, civilian, and forensic applications as a means of establishing identity. In this paper, we provide an overview of biometrics and discuss some of the salient research issues that need to be addressed for making biometric technology an effective tool for providing information security. The primary contribution of this overview includes: 1) examining applications where biometric scan solve issues pertaining to information security; 2) enumerating the fundamental challenges encountered by biometric systems in real-world applications; and 3) discussing solutions to address the problems of scalability and security in large-scale authentication systems. <s> BIB002 </s> Towards the Uses of Blockchain in Mobile Health Services and Applications: A Survey <s> Security Mechanisms in M-Health <s> Electronic fingerprint systems are now gaining acceptance in mainstream consumer applications worldwide. It has been shown, however, that about 80% of these systems are easily fooled with different kinds of fake fingers with imprinted patterns. Hence, a live finger detection mechanism will be a crucial part of any fingerprint system used in security applications. We present such a system based on measurement of electrical characteristics of different layers of the skin <s> BIB003 </s> Towards the Uses of Blockchain in Mobile Health Services and Applications: A Survey <s> Security Mechanisms in M-Health <s> In past three decades, the world of computation has changed from centralized (client-server not web-based) to distributed systems and now we are getting back to the virtual centralization (Cloud Computing). Location of data and processes makes the difference in the realm of computation. On one hand, an individual has full control on data and processes in his/her computer. On the other hand, we have the cloud computing wherein, the service and data maintenance is provided by some vendor which leaves the client/customer unaware of where the processes are running or where the data is stored. So, logically speaking, the client has no control over it. The cloud computing uses the internet as the communication media. When we look at the security of data in the cloud computing, the vendor has to provide some assurance in service level agreements (SLA) to convince the customer on security issues. Organizations use cloud computing as a service infrastructure, critically like to examine the security and confidentiality issues for their business critical insensitive applications. Yet, guaranteeing the security of corporate data in the "cloud" is difficult, if not impossible, as they provide different services like Software as a service (SaaS), Platform as a service (PaaS), and Infrastructure as a service (IaaS). Each service has their own security issues. So the SLA has to describe different levels of security and their complexity based on the services to make the customer understand the security policies that are being implemented. There has to be a standardized way to prepare the SLA irrespective to the providers. This can help some of the enterprises to look forward in using the cloud services. In this paper, we put forward some security issues that have to be included in SLA. <s> BIB004 </s> Towards the Uses of Blockchain in Mobile Health Services and Applications: A Survey <s> Security Mechanisms in M-Health <s> The wireless body area network has emerged as a new technology for e-healthcare that allows the data of a patient's vital body parameters and movements to be collected by small wearable or implantable sensors and communicated using short-range wireless communication techniques. WBAN has shown great potential in improving healthcare quality, and thus has found a wide range of applications from ubiquitous health monitoring and computer assisted rehabilitation to emergency medical response systems. The security and privacy protection of the data collected from a WBAN, either while stored inside the WBAN or during their transmission outside of the WBAN, is a major unsolved concern, with challenges coming from stringent resource constraints of WBAN devices, and the high demand for both security/privacy and practicality/usability. In this article we look into two important data security issues: secure and dependable distributed data storage, and fine-grained distributed data access control for sensitive and private patient medical data. We discuss various practical issues that need to be taken into account while fulfilling the security and privacy requirements. Relevant solutions in sensor networks and WBANs are surveyed, and their applicability is analyzed. <s> BIB005 </s> Towards the Uses of Blockchain in Mobile Health Services and Applications: A Survey <s> Security Mechanisms in M-Health <s> Well-known security experts decipher the most challenging aspect of cloud computing-security Cloud computing allows for both large and small organizations to have the opportunity to use Internet-based services so that they can reduce start-up costs, lower capital expenditures, use services on a pay-as-you-use basis, access applications only as needed, and quickly reduce or increase capacities. However, these benefits are accompanied by a myriad of security issues, and this valuable book tackles the most common security challenges that cloud computing faces. The authors offer you years of unparalleled expertise and knowledge as they discuss the extremely challenging topics of data ownership, privacy protections, data mobility, quality of service and service levels, bandwidth costs, data protection, and support. As the most current and complete guide to helping you find your way through a maze of security minefields, this book is mandatory reading if you are involved in any aspect of cloud computing. Coverage Includes: Cloud Computing Fundamentals Cloud Computing Architecture Cloud Computing Software Security Fundamentals Cloud Computing Risks Issues Cloud Computing Security Challenges Cloud Computing Security Architecture Cloud Computing Life Cycle Issues Useful Next Steps and Approaches <s> BIB006 </s> Towards the Uses of Blockchain in Mobile Health Services and Applications: A Survey <s> Security Mechanisms in M-Health <s> Cloud Computing is the fundamental change happening in the field of Information Technology. It is a representation of a movement towards the intensive, large scale specialization. On the other hand, it brings about not only convenience and efficiency problems, but also great challenges in the field of data security and privacy protection. Currently, security has been regarded as one of the greatest problems in the development of Cloud Computing. This paper describes the great requirements in Cloud Computing, security key technology, standard and regulation etc., and provides a Cloud Computing security framework. This paper argues that the changes in the above aspects will result in a technical revolution in the field of information security. <s> BIB007 </s> Towards the Uses of Blockchain in Mobile Health Services and Applications: A Survey <s> Security Mechanisms in M-Health <s> We describe a working implementation of a variant of Gentry's fully homomorphic encryption scheme (STOC 2009), similar to the variant used in an earlier implementation effort by Smart and Vercauteren (PKC 2010). Smart and Vercauteren implemented the underlying "somewhat homomorphic" scheme, but were not able to implement the bootstrapping functionality that is needed to get the complete scheme to work. We show a number of optimizations that allow us to implement all aspects of the scheme, including the bootstrapping functionality. ::: ::: Our main optimization is a key-generation method for the underlying somewhat homomorphic encryption, that does not require full polynomial inversion. This reduces the asymptotic complexity from O(n2.5) to O(n1.5) when working with dimension-n lattices (and practically reducing the time from many hours/days to a few seconds/minutes). Other optimizations include a batching technique for encryption, a careful analysis of the degree of the decryption polynomial, and some space/time trade-offs for the fully-homomorphic scheme. ::: ::: We tested our implementation with lattices of several dimensions, corresponding to several security levels. From a "toy" setting in dimension 512, to "small," "medium," and "large" settings in dimensions 2048, 8192, and 32768, respectively. The public-key size ranges in size from 70 Megabytes for the "small" setting to 2.3 Gigabytes for the "large" setting. The time to run one bootstrapping operation (on a 1-CPU 64- bit machine with large memory) ranges from 30 seconds for the "small" setting to 30 minutes for the "large" setting. <s> BIB008 </s> Towards the Uses of Blockchain in Mobile Health Services and Applications: A Survey <s> Security Mechanisms in M-Health <s> The fluidity of application markets complicate smartphone security. Although recent efforts have shed light on particular security issues, there remains little insight into broader security characteristics of smartphone applications. This paper seeks to better understand smartphone application security by studying 1,100 popular free Android applications. We introduce the ded decompiler, which recovers Android application source code directly from its installation image. We design and execute a horizontal study of smartphone applications based on static analysis of 21 million lines of recovered code. Our analysis uncovered pervasive use/misuse of personal/ phone identifiers, and deep penetration of advertising and analytics networks. However, we did not find evidence of malware or exploitable vulnerabilities in the studied applications. We conclude by considering the implications of these preliminary findings and offer directions for future analysis. <s> BIB009 </s> Towards the Uses of Blockchain in Mobile Health Services and Applications: A Survey <s> Security Mechanisms in M-Health <s> In this study two currently relevant aspects of using medical assistive technologies were addressed-security and privacy. In a two-step empirical approach that used focus groups (n = 19) and a survey (n = 104), users' requirements for the use of medical technologies were collected and evaluated. Specifically, we focused on the perceived importance of data security and privacy issues. Outcomes showed that both security and privacy aspects play an important role in the successful adoption of medical assistive technologies in the home environment. In particular, analysis of data with respect to gender, health-status and age (young, middle-aged and old users) revealed that females and healthy adults require, and insist on, the highest security and privacy standards compared with males and the ailing elderly. <s> BIB010 </s> Towards the Uses of Blockchain in Mobile Health Services and Applications: A Survey <s> Security Mechanisms in M-Health <s> The rise in the use of mobile devices, such as smartphones, tablet personal computers, and wireless medical devices, as well as the wireless networks that enable their use, has raised new concerns for data security and integrity. Standardized Health Insurance Portability and Accountability Act of 1996 (HIPAA)-compliant electronic data security that will allow ubiquitous use of mobile health technologies is needed. The lack of standardized data security to assure privacy, to allow interoperability, and to maximize the full capabilities of mobile devices presents a significant barrier to care. The purpose of this article is to provide an overview of the issue and to encourage discussion of this important topic. Current security needs, standards, limitations, and recommendations for how to address this barrier to care are discussed. <s> BIB011 </s> Towards the Uses of Blockchain in Mobile Health Services and Applications: A Survey <s> Security Mechanisms in M-Health <s> It is well-known that cloud computing has many potential advantages and many enterprise applications and data are migrating to public or hybrid cloud. But regarding some business-critical applications, the organizations, especially large enterprises, still wouldn't move them to cloud. The market size the cloud computing shared is still far behind the one expected. From the consumers' perspective, cloud computing security concerns, especially data security and privacy protection issues, remain the primary inhibitor for adoption of cloud computing services. This paper provides a concise but all-round analysis on data security and privacy protection issues associated with cloud computing across all stages of data life cycle. Then this paper discusses some current solutions. Finally, this paper describes future research work about data security and privacy protection issues in cloud. <s> BIB012 </s> Towards the Uses of Blockchain in Mobile Health Services and Applications: A Survey <s> Security Mechanisms in M-Health <s> To ensure the actual presence of a real legitimate trait in contrast to a fake self-manufactured synthetic or reconstructed sample is a significant problem in biometric authentication, which requires the development of new and efficient protection measures. In this paper, we present a novel software-based fake detection method that can be used in multiple biometric systems to detect different types of fraudulent access attempts. The objective of the proposed system is to enhance the security of biometric recognition frameworks, by adding liveness assessment in a fast, user-friendly, and non-intrusive manner, through the use of image quality assessment. The proposed approach presents a very low degree of complexity, which makes it suitable for real-time applications, using 25 general image quality features extracted from one image (i.e., the same acquired for authentication purposes) to distinguish between legitimate and impostor samples. The experimental results, obtained on publicly available data sets of fingerprint, iris, and 2D face, show that the proposed method is highly competitive compared with other state-of-the-art approaches and that the analysis of the general image quality of real biometric samples reveals highly valuable information that may be very efficiently used to discriminate them from fake traits. <s> BIB013 </s> Towards the Uses of Blockchain in Mobile Health Services and Applications: A Survey <s> Security Mechanisms in M-Health <s> Background: Mobile health (mHealth) apps aim at providing seamless access to tailored health information technology and have the potential to alleviate global health burdens. Yet, they bear risks to information security and privacy because users need to reveal private, sensitive medical information to redeem certain benefits. Due to the plethora and diversity of available mHealth apps, implications for information security and privacy are unclear and complex. Objective: The objective of this study was to establish an overview of mHealth apps offered on iOS and Android with a special focus on potential damage to users through information security and privacy infringements. Methods: We assessed apps available in English and offered in the categories “Medical” and “Health & Fitness” in the iOS and Android App Stores. Based on the information retrievable from the app stores, we established an overview of available mHealth apps, tagged apps to make offered information machine-readable, and clustered the discovered apps to identify and group similar apps. Subsequently, information security and privacy implications were assessed based on health specificity of information available to apps, potential damage through information leaks, potential damage through information manipulation, potential damage through information loss, and potential value of information to third parties. Results: We discovered 24,405 health-related apps (iOS; 21,953; Android; 2452). Absence or scarceness of ratings for 81.36% (17,860/21,953) of iOS and 76.14% (1867/2452) of Android apps indicates that less than a quarter of mHealth apps are in more or less widespread use. Clustering resulted in 245 distinct clusters, which were consolidated into 12 app archetypes grouping clusters with similar assessments of potential damage through information security and privacy infringements. There were 6426 apps that were excluded during clustering. The majority of apps (95.63%, 17,193/17,979; of apps) pose at least some potential damage through information security and privacy infringements. There were 11.67% (2098/17,979) of apps that scored the highest assessments of potential damages. Conclusions: Various kinds of mHealth apps collect and offer critical, sensitive, private medical information, calling for a special focus on information security and privacy of mHealth apps. In order to foster user acceptance and trust, appropriate security measures and processes need to be devised and employed so that users can benefit from seamlessly accessible, tailored mHealth apps without exposing themselves to the serious repercussions of information security and privacy infringements. [JMIR Mhealth Uhealth 2015;3(1):e8] <s> BIB014 </s> Towards the Uses of Blockchain in Mobile Health Services and Applications: A Survey <s> Security Mechanisms in M-Health <s> In heart-beat-based security, a security key is derived from the time difference between two consecutive heart beats (the Inter-Pulse-Interval, IPI) which may, subsequently, be used to enable secure communication. While heart-beatbased security holds promise in mobile health (mHealth) applications, there currently exists no work that provides a detailed characterization of the delivered security in a real system. In this paper, we evaluate the strength of IPI-based security keys in the context of entity authentication. We investigate several aspects which should be considered in practice, including subjects with reduced heart-rate variability, different sensor-sampling frequencies, inter-sensor variability (i.e., how accurate each entity may measure heart beats) as well as average and worst-caseauthentication time. Contrary to the current state of the art, our evaluation demonstrates that authentication using multiple, lessentropic keys may actually increase the key strength by reducing the effects of inter-sensor variability. Moreover, we find that the maximal key strength of a 60-bit key varies between 29.2 bits and only 5.7 bits, depending on the subject's heart-rate variability. To improve security, we introduce the Inter-multi-Pulse Interval (ImPI), a novel method of extracting entropy from the heart by considering the time difference between two non-consecutive heart beats. Given the same authentication time, using the ImPI for key generation increases key strength by up to 3.4x (+19.2 bits) for subjects with limited heart-rate variability, at the cost of an extended key-generation time of 4.8x (+45 sec). <s> BIB015 </s> Towards the Uses of Blockchain in Mobile Health Services and Applications: A Survey <s> Security Mechanisms in M-Health <s> With the rapid development of cloud computing, the privacy security incidents occur frequently, especially data security issues. Cloud users would like to upload their sensitive information to cloud service providers in encrypted form rather than the raw data, and to prevent the misuse of data. The main challenge is to securely process or analyze these encrypted data without disclosing any useful information, and to achieve the rights management efficiently. In this paper, we propose the encrypted data processing protocols for cloud computing by utilizing additively homomorphic encryption and proxy cryptography. For the traditional homomorphic encryption schemes with many limitations, which are not suitable for cloud computing applications. We simulate a cloud computing scenario with flexible access control and extend the original homomorphic cryptosystem to suit our scenario by supporting various arithmetical calculations. We also prove the correctness and security of our protocols, and analyze the advantages and performance by comparing with some latest works. <s> BIB016 </s> Towards the Uses of Blockchain in Mobile Health Services and Applications: A Survey <s> Security Mechanisms in M-Health <s> Many services for data analysis require customer’s data to be exposed and privacy issues are critical in related fields. To address this problem, we propose a Privacy-Preserving Naive Bayes classifier (PP-NBC) model which provides classification results without leaking privacy information in data sources. Through classification process in PP-NBC, the operations are evaluated using encrypted data by applying fully homomorphic encryption scheme so that service providers are able to handle customer’s data without knowing their actual values. The proposed method is implemented with a homomorphic encryption library called HElib and we carry out a primitive performance evaluation for the proposed PP-NBC. <s> BIB017 </s> Towards the Uses of Blockchain in Mobile Health Services and Applications: A Survey <s> Security Mechanisms in M-Health <s> The work shows a novel solution to create an access key which can be used within the transactions of electronic currencies, blockchain as well as in the field of computer security to guarantee a high level of secrecy, but also, with a high level of certainty, to provide a person identity through Information Fusion (IF) techniques and biometric data encryption. Specifically, two non-connected areas have been joined, Face Biometrics and Public-key Cryptography. This choice was taken in order to get through the limits these two approaches have found singularly and to give a suitable solution in the context of electronic and digital exchanges (electro-currencies, Internet of Things). An innovative and original algorithm has been developed, which can do fusion operations between Face Biometrics and numerical data, that is an algorithm of Hybrid Information Fusion, named FIF (Face Information Fusion), we decided to use a digital face as a biometric component, and the product of two prime numbers as a numerical component, that is the module in RSA algorithm. <s> BIB018 </s> Towards the Uses of Blockchain in Mobile Health Services and Applications: A Survey <s> Security Mechanisms in M-Health <s> Mobile Health (mHealth) applications are readily accessible to the average users of mobile devices, and despite the potential of mHealth applications to improve the availability, affordability and effectiveness of delivering healthcare services, they handle sensitive medical data, and as such, have also the potential to carry substantial risks to the security and privacy of their users. Developers of applications are usually unknown, and users are unaware of how their data are being managed and used. This is combined with the emergence of new threats due to the deficiency in mobile applications development or the design ambiguities of the current mobile operating systems. A number of mobile operating systems are available in the market, but the Android platform has gained the topmost popularity. However, Android security model is short of completely ensuring the privacy and security of users’ data, including the data of mHealth applications. Despite the security mechanisms provided by Android such as permissions and sandboxing, mHealth applications are still plagued by serious privacy and security issues. These security issues need to be addressed in order to improve the acceptance of mHealth applications among users and the efficacy of mHealth applications in the healthcare systems. The focus of this research is on the security of mHealth applications, and the main objective is to propose a coherent, practical and efficient framework to improve the security of medical data associated with Android mHealth applications, as well as to protect the privacy of their users. The proposed framework provides its intended protection mainly through a set of security checks and policies that ensure protection against traditional as well as recently published threats to mHealth applications. The design of the framework comprises two layers: a Security Module Layer (SML) that implements the security-check modules, and a System Interface Layer (SIL) that interfaces SML to the Android OS. SML enforces security and privacy policies at different levels of Android platform through SIL. The proposed framework is validated via a prototypic implementation on actual Android devices to show its practicality and evaluate its performance. The framework is evaluated in terms of effectiveness and efficiency. Effectiveness is evaluated by demonstrating the performance of the framework against a selected set of attacks, while efficiency is evaluated by comparing the performance overhead in terms of energy consumption, memory and CPU utilization, with the performance of a mainline, stock version of Android. Results of the experimental evaluations showed that the proposed framework can successfully protect mHealth applications against a wide range of attacks with negligible overhead, so it is both effective and practical. <s> BIB019 </s> Towards the Uses of Blockchain in Mobile Health Services and Applications: A Survey <s> Security Mechanisms in M-Health <s> Abstract Mobile Health (mHealth) applications are readily accessible to the average user of mobile devices, and despite the potential of mHealth applications to improve the availability, affordability and effectiveness of delivering healthcare services, they handle sensitive medical data, and as such, have also the potential to carry substantial risks to the security and privacy of their users. Developers of applications are usually unknown, and users are unaware of how their data are being managed and used. This is combined with the emergence of new threats due to the deficiency in mobile applications development or the design ambiguities of the current mobile operating systems. A number of mobile operating systems are available in the market, but the Android platform has gained the topmost popularity. However, Android security model is short of completely ensuring the privacy and security of users’ data, including the data of mHealth applications. Despite the security mechanisms provided by Android such as permissions and sandboxing, mHealth applications are still plagued by serious privacy and security issues. These security issues need to be addressed in order to improve the acceptance of mHealth applications among users and the efficacy of mHealth applications in the healthcare systems. Thus, this paper presents a conceptual framework to improve the security of medical data associated with Android mHealth applications, as well as to protect the privacy of their users. Based on the literature review that suggested the need for the intended security framework, three-distinct and successive phases are presented, each of which is described in a separate section. First, discussed the design process of the first phase to develop a security framework for mHealth apps to ensure the security and privacy of sensitive medical data. The second phase is discussed who to achieve the implementation of a prototypic proof-of-concept version of the framework. Finally, the third phase ending discussed the evaluation process in terms of effectiveness and efficiency for the proposed framework. <s> BIB020 </s> Towards the Uses of Blockchain in Mobile Health Services and Applications: A Survey <s> Security Mechanisms in M-Health <s> Android mobile operating system, Google developed, Linux Kernel based with basic motive to serve for devices with touchscreen like tablets and smartphones. Due to weak OS security it is vulnerable to various security attacks therefor to restrict access of third-party applications off critical resources the security has been built upon a permission based mechanism. Permissions are declarations by developers and user is demanded to accept. This paper highlights Share User ID permission misuse following two-factor authentication failure etc. <s> BIB021
Security of data collected by an m-Health application is a key issue in the credibility process of these systems. Health data has always been a very sensitive subject where privacy and security are important concerns for the patients. M-Health systems have a plethora of personal information that normally is not available to anyone besides the patient and the health service provider. With the introduction of e-Health, patient data began being transferred through several devices and, with the advent of M-Health, data is now accessible through a large number of smart devices, which may result in accidental or malicious leakage BIB005 . Therefore, the adaptation of cryptography mechanisms for the preservation of privacy in health care systems is a focus point where new implementations are constantly being researched and proposed. Hence, the security issues associated with m-Health can be broadly clustered into: i) where the data is stored; ii) what processes are used in order to store it; iii) and how the access is controlled BIB010 , BIB011 . Currently, the transition to remote cloud storage is a prominent innovation that is sweeping across the e-Health scene, as several characteristics inherent to this method are favorable. With the use of cloud storage, several advantages are introduced into existing systems without the need for large structural changes. From increased storage flexibility to fault tolerance and data recovery support, the process of retrieving lost or modified data is simpler, more reliable and with inferior costs. Due to the online characteristic of cloud services, the availability of information and data is assured. The data is distributed between multiple devices through an Internet connection BIB006 . As cloud technologies evolved, it became clear that they provided an optimal solution for e-health data storage. Inversely, the common mechanisms used to temporarily store and transmit information kept by health service providers stagnated. The data handling and storage process remained largely the same, but with data being transferred and stored in the cloud. To understand the challenges posed by the migration of health data from local, traditional data stores to the cloud, what cloud services offer and the way they work must be explored. Firstly, offers can differ in the type of service they provide, such as Platform-as-a-Service and Infrastructure-asa-Service. Secondly, the deployment model of the cloud can range from public to private, and to hybrid. These differ in terms of challenges posed, as the security concerns can fall in either the issues that the cloud provider himself or that companies or users face when handling cloud services BIB006 , BIB012 . Issues such as data breaches, faulty access management, the existence of malicious insiders, data loss and vulnerable systems, applications and APIs have been found to be most threatening to the security of cloud systems  . According to current healthcare practices, patient data is kept confidential by using a plethora of operational policies, protocols, technologies, and obligations of compliance to applicable law [62] ,  ,  ,  . This type of sensitive data is usually handled by systems purposely built and optimized to promote data security and confidentiality. These usually include features such as patient data access management, identity proofing, multi-level authentication and authorization, and fraud detection BIB006 , BIB012 , BIB007 . In fact, the most important characteristic that a health service provider can offer regarding health data security is confidentiality, both from external and internal actors. Externally, even if resources from the cloud service provider, such as computational power, are utilized in calculations, the data should remain leak-proof. Internally, access management mechanisms should ensure that only those with permission can access and alter patient data. BIB004 ,  . These confidentiality mechanisms, associated with proper data encryption, procedure protocols, and compliance laws, effectively ensure that a health service provider is a reliable and credible entity to store health data. Due to the intrinsic privacy challenges linked with patient healthcare data, e-health systems are expected to possess well-made underlying structures and workings. Moreover, they are expected to deliver quality of service, secure access management of health data and performance. Current information security standard procedures related to handling of health data often have to compromise either speed, security or cost for the benefit of the others BIB001 . Regarding m-Health applications, the aforementioned scenario presents slight changes. On account of the significant decrease of local processing power that mobile devices have in relation to standard servers or workstations, complex operations cannot be done locally. This, coupled with the fact that data is now only partially stored locally and mainly stored in remote storage, results in the access speed becoming much more reliant on the network quality used to communicate to the server where the data is stored. Therefore, the key challenges regarding the security of m-Health applications are secure storage, access management, and data transfer. Although in a very early stage, homomorphic encryption shows great promise in securing sensible encrypted data while it is being processed. It allows encrypted data to be used in calculations and have the same output as if the operation was made with the original decrypted data. Moreover, it would be possible to safely use cloud computational resources with patient health data in a way that would not expose any sensitive data BIB016 ,  , BIB008 . This, along with collaboration between different health services, can facilitate the use of services previously barred from accessing raw, decrypted health data. Currently, these encryption schemes have poor performance compared to other widely used, but new developments have been able to increase performance BIB008 . New research has also show a steady gain in relative performance compared to earlier methods  ,  . Moreover, there has also been an increase in possible applications of these mechanisms, such as outsourced computation BIB016 , BIB017 or voting systems  . The characteristics of this mechanism make the health industry a prime target for the integration of this technology. The method of how data is preserved secure and private relates heavily with how it was encrypted. The weakest link in an encryption scheme is usually how to keep the encryption key safe and guarantee that only the data owner has access to it. Traditionally, this was achieved using passwords, or other similar mechanisms. As is well known, the use of passwords is dangerous and unadvised, since they are, in nature, an insecure, although practical, means of controlling access to data. Recently, the proposal for using biometric signals as a way to grant access to information has been standardized into the mainstream smart device market, providing a safer and more practical way to access data than even the old password system BIB002 . Moreover, efforts are being made to use biometric signals, such like the fingerprint, to serve as a basis to create encryption keys for information, allowing a much stricter and user-friendly manner to keep information confidential and safe. Technology such as ultrasonic fingerprint sensor based on Piezoelectric Micromachined Ultrasonic Transducers (PMUT)  is a prime example of cutting edge work being done in the biometric sensor area that can be used in enhancing the security features of an whole application. This technology, still in development, is expected to reach markets from 2019 to 2020 in flagship smartphone models and wearable technologies. With more advanced biometric signal capturing, the capability to use this type of technology in securing applications and data is a very probable reality, as both industry and the general public seem to welcome this technology, both for its security features but especially because of its practicality in everyday usage. The usage of biometric factors is not a novel idea. Proposals for such solutions began appearing near the end of 1990  ,  . Using fingerprints to complement cryptography mechanisms, and going from a password to a biometric factor unique to the user provides both a more secure and practical method to encrypt or authenticate data. However, the technology behind the biometric data collection and the cryptography mechanisms available are wildly different and more complex. The types of sensors and types of information that can now be gathered, as well as the mechanisms to guarantee the privacy, integrity and security of this information have rapidly grown in number and potentials, paving the way for more robust, reliable and practical implementations. While a considerable amount of the research work seems to be dominated by the use of the fingerprint BIB003 as a key for unlocking health information, several other biometric factors and encryption techniques such as BIB015 , BIB013 , BIB018 are being researched and developed. The usage of biometric factors enables patients to have better control over their data, however they present several conceptual issues that are described in more detailed in 4. In addition to the above-mentioned technologies integrated into the m-Health field as new security mechanisms, the platforms for smartphones and other smart devices have also evolved, being subject of large amounts of research and testing. These contributions that are usually security updates and fixes can also be new framework proposals that aim to improve the security of current mobile operating systems BIB019 , BIB020 , BIB009 , BIB021 , BIB014 .