Authenticated Medical Documents Releasing with Privacy Protection and Release Control

In the context of Information Societies, a tremendous amount of information is daily exchanged or released. Among various information-release cases, medical document release has gained significant attention for its potential in improving healthcare service quality and efficacy. However, integrity and origin authentication of released medical documents is the priority in subsequent applications. Moreover, sensitive nature of much of this information also gives rise to a serious privacy threat when medical documents are uncontrollably made available to untrusted third parties. Redactable signatures allow any party to delete pieces of an authenticated document while guaranteeing the origin and integrity authentication of the resulting (released) subdocument. Nevertheless, most of existing redactable signature schemes (RSSs) are vulnerable to dishonest redactors or illegal redaction detection. To address the above issues, we propose two distinct RSSs with flexible release control (RSSs-FRC). We also analyse the performance of our constructions in terms of security, efficiency and functionality. The analysis results show that the performance of our construction has significant advantages over others, from the aspects of security and efficiency.

1 Introduction

The digital information collected by enterprises, public administrations, and governments has created enormous opportunities for knowledge-based applications. Driven by these benefits, there exists a high demand for the publication and exchange of collected data among numerous parties. However, sensitive information about users is typically contained in the original documents, and the privacy would be violated if such data is released without being processed. Document redaction, a straightforward method for privacy-preserving, is to remove sensitive information from the document. For example, document redaction is a critical approach for companies to prevent inadvertent or even malicious disclosure of proprietary formation while sharing data with outsourced operations.