USE OF PARALLEL COMPUTING FOR SECURITY METHOD IMPLEMENTATION BASED ON THE SHAMIR SCHEME IN A MEDICAL INFORMATION SYSTEM

Abstract

Medical information systems currently are becoming the most popular tools for processing,
storing, organizing, and transmitting patient medical data. Medical examinations can be presented
in the form of files in various formats and vary greatly in terms of size (from a few bytes to hundreds
of gigabytes). For example, some binary files are small and lightweight because they contain
only doctors' conclusions in the form of a text description. However, records of night video
monitoring of a patient or DICOM files of human organs CT scans containing several hundred
slices, can reach hundreds of gigabytes in size. Accordingly, large files require significant computing
resources when transferred from server to server. In addition, when using the security method,
which is an algorithm of a secret sharing (medical output file) according to the Shamir sharing
scheme, operations to split the secret into parts and merge the parts together may take longer in
serial operation than in parallel way. Therefore, it seems possible to speed up the processing of
big data without reducing the level of security. The main purpose of the work is to confirm the
hypothesis of reducing time to perform the operation of splitting and merging parts of a secret
based on parallel computing tools withing implementing the security method according to the
Shamir secret sharing scheme in a medical information system. The object of the study is a security
method developed by the author for implementation in the information security subsystems of a
medical information system. As part of the study, author analyzed the most effective tools for parallelizing
processes (like MPI and OpenMP). MPI has been used as a tool as much more suitable
for the current purpose. Moreover, several waves of experiments have been run (analysis of time
depending on the number of parallel streams and the number of characters contained in the
DICOM file) and allowed us to prove a concept of parallelizing the secret exchange algorithm
based on the Shamir scheme, achieving almost linear acceleration using the MPI library