Scalable and Secure Sharing of Personal Health Records in Cloud Computing Using Attribute-Based Encryption

Abstract

Abstract-Personal health record (PHR) is an emerging patient-centric model of health information exchange, which is often outsourced to be stored at a third party, such as cloud providers. However, there have been wide privacy concerns as personal health information could be exposed to those third party servers and to unauthorized parties. To assure the patients' control over access to their own PHRs, it is a promising method to encrypt the PHRs before outsourcing. Yet, issues such as risks of privacy exposure, scalability in key management, flexible access and efficient user revocation, have remained the most important challenges toward achieving fine-grained, cryptographically enforced data access control. In this paper, we propose a novel patient-centric framework and a suite of mechanisms for data access control to PHRs stored in semi-trusted servers. To achieve fine-grained and scalable data access control for PHRs, we leverage attribute based encryption (ABE) techniques to encrypt each patient's PHR file. Different from previous works in secure data outsourcing, we focus on the multiple data owner scenario, and divide the users in the PHR system into multiple security domains that greatly reduces the key management complexity for owners and users. A high degree of patient privacy is guaranteed simultaneously by exploiting multi-authority ABE. Our scheme also enables dynamic modification of access policies or file attributes, supports efficient on-demand user/attribute revocation and break-glass access under emergency scenarios. Extensive analytical and experimental results are presented which show the security, scalability and efficiency of our proposed scheme.

Security and Privacy in the Medical Internet of Things: A Review

“…Simulation results showed that their access control is efficient, fine-grained, and scalable. Li et al [9] proposed a novel patient-centric framework and a suite of mechanisms for data access control to PHRs stored in semitrusted servers. To achieve fine-grained and scalable data access control for PHRs, they leveraged attribute-based encryption (ABE) techniques to encrypt each patient's PHR file and exploited multiauthority ABE to guarantee a high degree of patient privacy.…”

A Cloud-Based eHealth Architecture for Privacy Preserving Data Integration

“…There exists also a number of architectures that employ Attribute-Based encryption (ABE) scheme [14][15][16]19,27]. However, these approaches have several limitations.…”

ABE Based Online Personal Health Record System Using Cloud Computing

“…So it reduces the key management complexity. In [1][2], both KP-ABE and MA-ABE is used for reducing the key management complexity.…”

“…In this patients can store their health information on certain web servers. A PHR system allows a patient to create, manage and control their personal health data in centralized place through the web [1]. Each patient has full control over their medical records and they can share the health data with a wide range of users including healthcare providers, family members, friends etc.…”