Evaluation of the impact of encryption on video transmissions (in e-health applications)

Abstract: E-health has been growing steadily with an increasing benefit for medical care and patients. One part of e-health is telemedicine where video transmissions could be used for medical treatment. To be able to reach out to the public it has to use the available infrastructure which involves the Internet. Doing so introduces the need for encryption in order to protect the confidentiality of the users. It was investigated what the performance cost would be for a broad set of hardware related to a Persona that does not have the most recent technology available. For each hardware, the corresponding utilization of the standardized symmetric algorithm Advanced Encryption Standard has been visualized in relation to the key size and three different video resolutions. The results show that utilization of a single core ranges from irrelevant, 0,84%, to low, 24%, when encrypting a high definition 1080p 2-way video transmission. The scope covers a smartphone, a laptop and a desktop computer with results for each of them. These results could be used when implementing an application based on the Advanced Encryption Standard, which is anapproved standard in the USA for an e-health application. The results could also be used in other contexts when encryption is needed and are not specifically bound to e-health.