IEEE Consumer Electronics Magazine - September 2018 - 29
giardiasis, microsporidiosis, intestinal helminths, hepatitis,
tuberculosis, measles, pertussis, malaria, and syphilis [13].
VISA APPROVAL TO PROTECT AGAINST
COMMUNICABLE DISEASES
Simply tightening border controls would not result in the
elimination of these kinds of communicable diseases. In
this scenario, medical tests conducted prior to the issuance
of visas play a vital role in preventing the spread of diseas-
es. When a person is exposed to a virus, the body's immune
system creates new B cells designed to fight that virus.
This immunity may last for several years, or even decades,
which means that the fingerprints of every virus that has
ever been in that person's body could still be found after
the initial exposure. Blood tests can easily identify the set
of antibodies for any virus and help doctors properly diag-
nose a visa applicant's health condition. These types of
medical reports, however, are susceptible to security breach-
es and/or attacks.
For example, if a medical test report that declares an
applicant as unfit is handed over to the applicant once the
test is complete, the applicant, using the latest technolo-
gies, can easily modify it and provide it to the embassy for
visa processing (Figure 2). The visa-processing center will
likely be unaware that the report has been altered. As a
result, anyone granted a visa, based on that tampered medi-
cal report, would surely pose a danger to the country in
which he or she is traveling. It must be made certain that
secret and clinically accurate reports are delivered to the
embassy from the medical center. An online report that is
sent from the medical center directly to the embassy helps
to ensure that this occurs.
APPLICATION SYSTEM DESIGN
The focus of this article is on informing the embassy as to
the actual medical condition of an applicant, who should
have no part in transferring the medical report. The appli-
cant must not know what is contained in the report, i.e.,
whether he or she is medically fit to obtain a visa. This will
help maintain the transparency of visa processing and, just
as importantly, protect the country from the spread of dis-
eases. This system provides multilayered security to the
patient's medical and personal data when it is transmitted
from the authorized testing center to the embassy and stored
in the embassy's database. Before the information is trans-
mitted through public channels, the report is first prepro-
cessed and encrypted. The encrypted report is then hidden
by cover audio in such a way that no one can tamper with it.
The authentication of the file is also maintained through a
digital signature approach. The entire process is conducted
in two places: at the medical center (Figure 3) and on the
embassy's end.
These global health crises
necessitated the implementation
of an effective screening process
for international entries not only
in the United States but in other
countries as well.
the country, and a fitness certificate from a doctor based on
the applicant's medical history. Some of the data in this
report are in text format and others are images; prior to
encryption, these data are preprocessed separately.
ENCRYPTION OF PREPROCESSED MEDICAL REPORTS
The encryption of the applicant's data follows the preprocess-
ing step. This step converts the medical report to a binary for-
mat. Each character of text in the report is represented by
6-bit ASCII (1), and the intensity of the pixels is represented
in an 8-bit binary format.
Case sensitivity is not relevant to understanding the patho-
logical test data, so the reports can be represented by upper-
case letters (A-Z), numbers (0-9), and special characters
(!, #, $, and %, and so on). If these characters are only used
to represent text, a very interesting feature of ASCII is intro-
duced: a 6-bit representation of a character. This process first
converts the reports to uppercase and represents each charac-
ter in 7-bit ASCII as b 7, b 6, b 5, b 4, b 3, b 2, and b 1. Then the 6-bit
representation for each character is generated by discarding
the most significant bit (MSB). This bit loss is accurately
received back at the embassy based on the following equation:
b7 = '
0 if b 6 = 1
.
1 if b 6 = 0
(1)
Now the 6 bits of characters, as well as the 8 bits of pixels,
are concatenated to form a binary string to be encrypted,
which provides the first layer of security. The preprocessed
binary string is encrypted using the reversible nature of 2's
OPERATIONAL DETAILS AT A MEDICAL CENTER
The medical report of an applicant for visa processing con-
tains the pathological test data, X-ray report, vaccinations per
FIGURE 2. A visa interview at the U.S. Embassy in Manila, Philippines [15].
september 2018
^
IEEE Consumer Electronics Magazine
29
Table of Contents for the Digital Edition of IEEE Consumer Electronics Magazine - September 2018
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