Searchable Encryption With Autonomous Path Delegation Function and Its Application in Healthcare Cloud

Outsourcing medical data to healthcare cloud has become a popular trend. Since medical data of patients contain sensitive personal information, they should be encrypted before outsourcing. However, information retrieval methods based on plaintext cannot be directly applied to encrypted data. In this article, we present a new cryptographic primitive named conjunctive keyword search with secure channel free and autonomous path delegation function (AP-SCF-PECKS), which can be applied in scenarios where patients want to search for and autonomous delegate their private medical information without revealing their private key. Particularly, the proposed solution allows patients to set up multi-hop delegation path with their preferences, and the delegated doctors in the path can search for and access the patient’s private medical information with priority from high to low. Patients can ensure that authorized doctors are always trustworthy, and unauthorized users cannot obtain the private medical information of patients. Moreover, the scheme supports the conjunctive keyword search, secure channel free, and is secure against chosen keyword attack, chosen ciphertext attack, and keyword guessing attack. The security of proposed scheme has been formally proved in the standard model. Finally, the performance evaluations demonstrate that the overhead of proposed scheme are modest for healthcare cloud scenarios.