A Fast CP-ABE System for Cyber-Physical Security and Privacy in Mobile Healthcare Network

Abstract

A healthcare network as a new context-aware cyber-physical system (CPS) includes embedded sensors, Internet of Things technology, and cloud computing. With the intellectualization of mobile terminal devices, mobile healthcare networks are automatically generated and can provide convenient healthcare services and real-time communication. However, two problems in the CPS need to resolved. A solution to the first problem is to mitigate the computational and storage cost of a mobile terminal. A solution to the second problem is to provide the cyber-physical privacy and security for healthcare data. Ciphertext-policy attribute-based encryption (CP-ABE) can provide data privacy and secure sharing in an open environment. In this article, a fast CP-ABE scheme is provided in order to satisfy the use of mobile terminal devices with low computational and storage power. In the proposed scheme, the work of a system can deliver expensive computational tasks to semitrusted third parties, ensuring a constant number of simple local computations. The scheme can also verify the correctness of the decryption result by using a Boneh–Lynn–Shacham short signature scheme. The CP-ABE scheme not only ensures the cyber-physical security of healthcare data, but also reduces the local load from the efficiency analysis and experimental results.