Unified fine-grained access control for personal health records in cloud computing

Abstract

Attribute-based encryption has been a promising encryption technology to secure personal health records (PHRs) sharing in cloud computing. PHRs consist of the patient data often collected from various sources including hospitals and general practice centres. Different patients' access policies have a common access sub-policy. In this paper, we propose a novel attribute-based encryption scheme for fine-grained and flexible access control to PHRs data in cloud computing. The scheme generates shared information by the common access sub-policy, which is based on different patients' access policies. Then, the scheme combines the encryption of PHRs from different patients. Therefore, both time consumption of encryption and decryption can be reduced. Medical staff require varying levels of access to PHRs. The proposed scheme can also support multi-privilege access control so that medical staff can access the required level of information while maximizing patient privacy. Through implementation and simulation, we demonstrate that the proposed scheme is efficient in terms of time. Moreover, we prove the security of the proposed scheme based on security of the ciphertext-policy attribute-based encryption scheme.