An efficient and outsourcing-supported attribute-based access control scheme for edge-enabled smart healthcare

Abstract

In recent years, the continuous development of smart healthcare has brought substantial convenience to our lives, especially for emerging edge-enabled smart healthcare systems that transmit and store a large amount of medical data. However, if private health data of users are leaked or tampered with, it will cause enormous damage to users’ rights, even threatening the safety of their lives. Traditionally, attribute-based encryption (ABE) is used to encrypt data and implement fine-grained access control for such sensitive information. However, the computing overhead of traditional ABE is relatively large, and in an edge-enabled environment, the outsourcing part of encryption and decryption to the edge node can reduce the computing cost of resource-constrained devices for edge-enabled smart healthcare. However, current schemes are not efficient for resource-constrained devices and edge nodes. Therefore, an efficient ABE scheme is proposed that outsources part of the encryption and decryption to the edge nodes as well as supports attribute updates, enabling flexible right control. A formal security proof is provided, verifying that our scheme is secure under the Decisional Bilinear Diffie–Hellman assumption. The performance of our scheme is evaluated at different security levels, and the experimental results demonstrate that our scheme is more efficient for resource-constrained devices than the traditional ABE.