Flexible access control for outsourcing personal health services in cloud computing using hierarchical attribute set based encryption

Abstract

Online personal health record (PHR) enables patients to manage their own medical records in a centralized way, which greatly facilitates the storage, access and sharing of personal health data. With the emergence of cloud computing, it is attractive for the PHR service providers to shift their PHR applications and storage into the cloud, in order to enjoy the elastic resources and reduce the operational cost. However, by storing PHRs in the cloud, the patients lose physical control to their personal health data, which makes it necessary for each patient to encrypt her PHR data before uploading to the cloud servers. Under encryption, it is challenging to achieve fine-grained access control to PHR data in a scalable and efficient way by using FADE. For each patient, the PHR data should be encrypted so that it is scalable with the number of users having access. Also, since there are multiple owners (patients) in a PHR system and every owner would encrypt her PHR files using a different set of cryptographic keys, it is important to reduce the key distribution complexity in such multi-owner settings. Existing cryptographic enforced access control schemes are mostly designed for the single-owner scenarios. In order to realize scalable, flexible, and fine-grained access control of outsourced data in cloud computing, in this research, we propose hierarchical attribute-set-based encryption (HASBE) by extending cipher text-policy attribute-set-based encryption (ASBE) with a hierarchical structure of users. The proposed scheme not only achieves scalability due to its hierarchical structure, but also inherits flexibility and fine-grained access control in supporting compound attributes of ASBE.