Efficient Privacy-Preserving Access Control Scheme in Electronic Health Records System

Area of Science:

• Health Informatics
• Cybersecurity
• Cryptography

Background:

• Sharing electronic health records (EHR) in cloud environments enhances medical system efficiency but raises significant security and privacy concerns.
• EHR data contains sensitive personal information, posing risks of privacy leakage and diagnostic interference if accessed by unauthorized users.
• Ensuring EHR owners maintain full control over their data while preserving privacy presents a complex challenge.

Purpose of the Study:

• To propose a novel privacy-preserving access control (PPAC) scheme for electronic health records (EHR).
• To enable fine-grained access control over EHR data while safeguarding patient privacy.
• To offer a secure and efficient solution for managing sensitive health information in cloud-based systems.

Main Methods:

• Utilized an attribute-based signcryption (ABSC) mechanism for data encryption based on access policies derived from linear secret sharing schemes.
• Employed cuckoo filters to obscure access policies, thereby protecting the EHR owner's privacy.
• Conducted security analysis based on decisional bilinear Diffie-Hellman exponent and computational Diffie-Hellman exponent assumptions in the standard model.

Main Results:

• The proposed PPAC scheme provides provable security against potential threats.
• Performance analysis demonstrated low communication and computation costs compared to existing schemes.
• The scheme effectively preserves the EHR owner's privacy while maintaining data accessibility.

Conclusions:

• The developed PPAC scheme offers a robust solution for secure EHR sharing in cloud environments.
• It balances the need for efficient data access with stringent privacy protection requirements.
• The scheme is well-suited for practical implementation in modern EHR systems.