Privacy Preserving PHR System in Cloud using Attribute-Based Encryption

Abstract

An important application of data sharing in cloud environment is the storage and retrieval of Patient Health Records (PHR) that maintain the patient’s personal and diagnosis information. These records should be maintained with privacy and security for safe retrieval.The data are allowed to be accessed only by authorized persons. Each party is assigned with access permission for a set of attributes. Data owners update the patient data into cloud servers.To ensure the patient’s control over access to their own PHRs, it is the best method to encrypt the PHRs before outsourcing. The attribute based encryption (ABE) scheme is used to secure these patient records. Multiple owners are allowed to access the PHRs.we propose patient- centric framework for secure sharing of PHRs under the multi owner settings by using multi-authority attribute-based encryption (MA-ABE)which guarantees the high degree of patient’s privacy. To reduce the key distribution complexity, we divided the users in the PHRs system into multiple security domains. This 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.

Keywords: Cloud computing, Personal health records, Attribute-based encryption, Fine-grained access control