Mohammad Kazem Poozesh
M.Sc. Candidate
Supervisor: Dr. Saeed Samet

A Secure e-Prescription System Based on NFC

Department of Computer Science
Tuesday, September 27, 2016, 11:00 am, Room EN 2022

---

Abstarct

The main purpose of this thesis is to introduce a secure e-prescription system which is able to preserve the privacy of both patients and physicians. Both the patient and the physician have privacy concerns with the paper-based prescription. Patients have concerned with disclosure of their diseases information which might be a source of embarrassment, lack of confidence or damage to the individual’s reputation. On the other hand, drug companies want to figure out physicians prescribing patterns to persuade them for prescribing their drugs by sending their representatives to them. In this thesis, I introduce a new e-prescription system based on Near Field Communication (NFC) technology, using smartphone and cryptographic tools such as digital signatures in order to protect the identity of both patients and physicians. The proposed system is implemented as a mobile application to use on smartphones and other hand-held devices. In order to achieve this goal, this thesis adopts a digital proxy signature and a short group signature. The proxysignature helps patients to delegate their signing right to another party in order to collect their prescriptions in sickness or other specific situations. The short group signature helps the physicians to sign the prescription anonymously in a group of physicians, which will protect the identity of the physician. The short group signature by Boneh et al. has been used in the implementation. This signature is shorter than RSA-based signatures that helps to suit better this application on handheld devices which have power and computation constraints. The implementation of this system also uses NFC on smartphones which will be used at pharmacies by the patients as the proof of identity. As a result, without revealing the real identity, patients will be able to collect their prescriptions.