RS-HABE: Revocable-Storage and Hierarchical Attribute-Based Access Scheme for Secure Sharing of e-Health Records in Public Cloud

Personal e-health records (EHR) enable medical workers (e.g., doctors and nurses) to conveniently and quickly access each patient’s medical history through the public cloud, which greatly facilitates patients’ visits and makes telemedicine possible. Additionally, since EHR involve patients’ personal privacy information, EHR holders would hesitate to directly outsource their data to cloud servers. A natural and favorite manner of conquering this issue is to encrypt these outsourced EHR such that only authorized medical workers can access them. Specifically, the ciphertext-policy attribute-based encryption (CP-ABE) supports fine-grained access over encrypted data and is considered to be a perfect solution of securely sharing EHR in the public cloud. In this paper, to strengthen the system security and meet the requirement of specific applications, we add functionalities of user revocation, secret key delegation and ciphertext update to the original ABE, and propose a revocable-storage hierarchical attribute-based encryption (RS-HABE) scheme, as the core building of establishing a framework for secure sharing of EHR in public cloud. The proposed RS-HABE scheme features of forward security (a revoked user can no longer access previously encrypted data) and backward security (a revoked user also cannot access subsequently encrypted data) simultaneously, and is proved to be selectively secure under a complexity assumption in bilinear groups, without random oracles. The theoretical analysis indicates that the proposed scheme surpasses existing similar works in terms of functionality and security, at the acceptable cost of computation overhead. Moreover, we implement the proposed scheme and present experiments to demonstrate its practicability.

1 Introduction

The rapid development of technologies on cloud computing and big data has brought great changes in the medical field. Specifically, the emergence and wide use of electronic health records (EHR) enable medical workers (such as doctors and nurses) to conveniently and quickly access each patient’s medical history through the internet. Compared with the traditional management manner of medical data, EHR greatly improve the treatment efficiency, which is especially important in medical emergencies. Additionally, the digitization of personal health information results in tremendous amounts of medical data, from which some invaluable information that cannot be obtained by reading individual medical data can be disclosed by employing the data mining technology, such as flu forecast and pathology disclosure. Due to the serious challenges introduced by the storage, access and management of a large collection of EHR data, various EHR based healthcare services are popularly outsourced to external cloud computing service providers, such as Microsoft HealthVault and IBM Watson Health.