Apple has partnered with a security company to add end-to-end encryption ("End-to-end" in English) to the data collected by CareKit, which will make it easier for hospitals to use the platform while complying with the privacy regulations of patient data. We remember that CareKit allows patients to share our health data from the iPhone application with the doctors who are treating us.
Currently, CareKit data is already encrypted by default, but not end-to-end, meaning that any information stored in the cloud can be opened and decrypted by the owners of a service. Mashable says that Apple to partner with security company Tresorit to offer better encryption options to developers.
Apple partners with Tresorit to make CareKit more secure
Tresorit's security technology, called ZeroKit, will offer user authentication for patients and healthcare workers, end-to-end encryption of healthcare data and 'zero knowledge' when sharing data, in which data They will not be shared with any services while they are being transferred.
According to those in Cupertino, Zerokit offers three benefits over standard encryption:
- ZeroKit cares about user registration and authentication, so developers will never have access to passwords or worry about possible hacking of their servers.
- Una breach in a server will not provide in any case access to the data decrypted.
- "Zero knowledge" it means that no one between the patient and the doctor will ever have access to the patient's data or their passwords, giving hospitals the certainty that they comply 100% with the privacy regulations between doctor and patient.
According to the company that Apple is supposed to partner with, no one ever got a $ 50.000 prize for cracking their encryption despite the fact that there have already been a whole year of attempts, among which the MIT and Stanford and Harvard universities stand out.
Personally, I think that all this offering greater security for our health data It's fine, but while I'm writing this post, I can't stop thinking about a question: if this security can be added, something that no one doubted, is it so difficult to create something secure that allows us, officially, to create a backup of our data to recover it after a clean restoration of our iPhone?