Unified Fine-Grained Access Control for Personal Health Records in Cloud Computing

Area of Science:

• Computer Science
• Information Security
• Cloud Computing

Background:

• Personal Health Records (PHRs) contain sensitive patient data collected from diverse sources.
• Secure sharing of PHRs in cloud environments is crucial, requiring robust access control mechanisms.
• Existing attribute-based encryption schemes may not fully address the complexities of shared access policies and multi-level data access.

Purpose of the Study:

• To propose a novel attribute-based encryption scheme for fine-grained and flexible access control of PHRs in cloud computing.
• To reduce the time consumption for encryption and decryption processes.
• To support multi-privilege access control for medical staff, balancing data access with patient privacy.

Main Methods:

• Developed a novel attribute-based encryption scheme leveraging common access sub-policies derived from different patients' access policies.
• Combined encryption of PHRs from multiple patients based on shared sub-policies.
• Implemented and simulated the proposed scheme to evaluate its efficiency and security.

Main Results:

• The proposed scheme efficiently reduces time consumption for both encryption and decryption.
• Demonstrated efficient performance through implementation and simulation.
• The scheme effectively supports multi-privilege access control, enhancing usability for medical staff.

Conclusions:

• The novel attribute-based encryption scheme provides an efficient solution for secure PHR sharing in cloud computing.
• The scheme achieves fine-grained access control, optimizes processing times, and enhances patient privacy.
• Security is proven based on the established security of ciphertext-policy attribute-based encryption schemes.