A searchable personal health records framework with fine-grained access control in cloud-fog computing

Area of Science:

• Computer Science
• Information Security
• Healthcare Informatics

Background:

• Cloud computing faces limitations in supporting mobile applications due to latency and congestion.
• Existing encryption schemes present high computational and storage overhead in fog environments.
• Mobile health applications require efficient, secure, and fine-grained access to personal health records.

Purpose of the Study:

• To propose a searchable personal health records framework leveraging cloud-fog computing.
• To implement fine-grained access control and efficient keyword search capabilities.
• To address the security and performance challenges of mobile health data in a distributed environment.

Main Methods:

• Integration of attribute-based encryption (ABE) and search encryption (SE) technologies.
• Development of a multi-authority scheme to mitigate key leakage issues.
• Outsourcing of encryption and decryption operations to fog nodes for efficiency.

Main Results:

• The proposed framework enables accurate keyword searches and fine-grained access control.
• Secure outsourcing of computations to fog nodes enhances efficiency for resource-constrained devices.
• The scheme is proven secure based on decisional q-parallel bilinear Diffie-Hellman exponent (q-DBDHE) and decisional bilinear Diffie-Hellman (DBDH) assumptions.

Conclusions:

• The developed cloud-fog framework offers an efficient and secure solution for personal health records management.
• It effectively balances local resource utilization and the needs of mobile applications.
• The proposed system demonstrates practical applicability in healthcare scenarios requiring robust data security and accessibility.