Ciphertext-Policy Attribute-Based Encryption with Multi-keyword Search over Medical Cloud Data

Over the years, public health has faced a large number of challenges like COVID-19. Medical cloud computing is a promising method since it can make healthcare costs lower. The computation of health data is outsourced to the cloud server. If the encrypted medical data is not decrypted, it is difficult to search for those data. Many researchers have worked on searchable encryption schemes that allow executing searches on encrypted data. However, many existing works support single-keyword search. In this article, we propose a patient-centered fine-grained attribute-based encryption scheme with multi-keyword search (CP-ABEMKS) for medical cloud computing. First, we leverage the ciphertext-policy attribute-based technique to construct trapdoors. Then, we give a security analysis. Besides, we provide a performance evaluation, and the experiments demonstrate the efficiency and practicality of the proposed CP-ABEMKS.

I. Introduction

The scale of digital patient records, like personal health records (PHRs), has proliferated. In traditional medical institutions, patients' information is mainly stored in the local database of medical institutions. It not only lacks a unified and perfect platform for integration and management but also has a high risk of being intercepted and stolen by criminals, which results in the leakage of medical information [1], [2]. Therefore, it is essential to find an effective method to address this issue.