Sharing and Privacy in PHRs: Efficient Policy Hiding and Update Attribute-based Encryption

Abstract

Personal health records (PHRs) is an electronic medical system that enables patients to acquire, manage and share their health data. Nevertheless, data confidentiality and user privacy in PHRs have not been handled completely. As a fine-grained access control over health data, ciphertext-policy attribute-based encryption (CP-ABE) has an ability to guarantee data confidentiality. However, existing CP-ABE solutions for PHRs are facing some new challenges in access control, such as policy privacy disclosure and dynamic policy update. In terms of addressing these problems, we propose a privacy protection and dynamic share system (PPADS) based on CP-ABE for PHRs, which supports full policy hiding and flexible access control. In the system, attribute information of access policy is fully hidden by attribute bloom filter. Moreover, data user produces a transforming key for the PHRs Cloud to change access policy dynamically. Furthermore, relied on security analysis, PPADS is selectively secure under standard model. Finally, the performance comparisons and simulation results demonstrate that PPADS is suitable for PHRs.