Scalable and secure sharing of personal health

Scalable and Secure Sharing of Personal Health Records in
Cloud Computing using Attribute-based Encryption
Abstract—

Personal health record (PHR) is an emerging patient-centric model of health
information exchange, which is often outsourced to be stored at a third party, such
as cloud providers. However, there have been wide privacy concerns as personal
health information could be exposed to those third party servers and to
unauthorized parties. To assure the patients’ control over access to their own
PHRs, it is a promising method to encrypt the PHRs before outsourcing. Yet,
issues such as risks of privacy exposure, scalability in key management, flexible
access and efficient user revocation, have remained the most important challenges
toward achieving fine-grained, cryptographically enforced data access control. In
this paper, we propose a novel patient-centric framework and a suite of
mechanisms for data access control to PHRs stored in semi-trusted servers. To
achieve fine-grained and scalable data access control for PHRs, we leverage
attribute based encryption (ABE) techniques to encrypt each patient’s PHR file.
Different from previous works in secure data outsourcing, we focus on the multiple
data owner scenario, and divide the users in the PHR system into multiple security
domains that greatly reduces the key management complexity for owners and
users. A high degree of patient privacy is guaranteed simultaneously by exploiting
multi-authority ABE. Our 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. Extensive analytical and
experimental results are presented which show the security, scalability and
efficiency of our proposed scheme.

Reasons for the proposal :

While it is exciting to have convenient PHR (Public health records)services for
everyone, there are many security and privacy risks which could impede its wide
adoption. The main concern is about whether the patients could actually control the
sharing of their sensitive personal health information (PHI), especially when they
are stored on a third-party server which people may not fully trust. On the one
hand, although there exist healthcare regulations such as HIPAA which is recently
amended to incorporate business associates [4], cloud providers are usually not
covered entities [5]. On the other hand, due to the high value of the sensitive
personal health information (PHI), the third-party storage servers are often the
targets of various malicious behaviors which may lead to exposure of the PHI.

Existing proposal :

A feasible and promising approach would be to encrypt the data before
outsourcing. Basically, the PHR owner herself should decide how to encrypt her
files and to allow which set of users to obtain access to each file. A PHR file
should only be available to the users who are given the corresponding decryption
key, while remain confidential to the rest of users. Furthermore, the patient shall
always retain the right to not only grant, but also revoke access privileges when
they feel it is necessary.

Demerits :

However, the goal of patient-centric privacy is often in conflict with scalability in a
PHR system. The authorized users may either need to access the PHR for personal
use or professional purposes. Examples of the former are family member and
friends, while the latter can be medical doctors, pharmacists, and researchers, etc.
We refer to the two categories of users as personal and professional users,

respectively. The latter has potentially large scale; should each owner herself be
directly responsible for managing all the professional users, she will easily be
overwhelmed by the key management overhead. In addition, since those users’
access requests are generally unpredictable, it is difficult for an owner to determine
a list of them. On the other hand, different from the single data owner scenario
considered in most of the existing works [8], [9], in a PHR system, there are
multiple owners who may encrypt according to their own ways, possibly using
different sets of cryptographic keys. Letting each user obtain keys from every
owner whose PHR she wants to read would limit the accessibility since patients are
not always online. An alternative is to employ a central authority (CA) to do the
key management on behalf of all PHR owners, but this requires too much trust on a
single authority (i.e., cause the key escrow problem).

Proposed system :

In this paper, we endeavor to study the patientcentric, secure sharing of PHRs
stored on semi-trusted servers, and focus on addressing the complicated and
challenging key management issues. In order to protect the personal health data
stored on a semi-trusted server, we adopt attribute-based encryption (ABE) as the
main encryption primitive. Using ABE, access policies are expressed based on the
attributes of users or data, which enables a patient to selectively share her PHR
among a set of users by encrypting the file under a set of attributes, without the
need to know a complete list of users. The complexities per encryption, key
generation and decryption are only linear with the number of attributes involved.
However, to integrate ABE into a large-scale PHR system, important issues such
as key management scalability, dynamic policy updates, and efficient on-demand
revocation are non-trivial to solve, and remain largely open up-to-date. To this end,
we make the following main contributions:

(1) We propose a novel ABE-based framework for patient-centric secure sharing of
PHRs in cloud computing environments, under the multi-owner settings. To
address the key management challenges, we conceptually divide the users in the
system into two types of domains, namely public and personal domains. In
particular, the majority professional users are managed distributively by attribute
authorities in the former, while each owner only needs to manage the keys of a
small number of users in her personal domain. In this way, our framework can
simultaneously handle different types of PHR sharing applications’ requirements,
while incurring minimal key management overhead for both owners and users in
the system. In addition, the framework enforces write access control, handles
dynamic policy updates, and provides break-glass access to PHRs under
emergence scenarios.

Scalable and secure sharing of personal health

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