Untouchable Once Revoking: A Practical and Secure Dynamic EHR Sharing System via Cloud

Abstract

Healthcare Internet-of-Things (IoT) enables lightweight devices to observe patients’ vital signals and outsource them to a remote cloud to enjoy flexible data sharing. However, it faces many security threats as the outsourced data is no longer physically controlled by data owners, and the cloud that hosts the outsourced data is not fully trusted. Many privacy protection technologies have been adopted to solve this problem, among which cryptographic mechanisms have become one of the most promising tools. Unfortunately, current cryptographic mechanisms in healthcare IoT mainly suffer from the following challenges: 1) dynamic user groups for managing users’ accessibility; 2) efficient revocation mechanism to mitigate the burden during user revocation; 3) forward and backward secrecy to ensure session independence in the presence of session key leakage; 4) revocable storage to prevent data users from learning any unauthorized data even the data is authorized before; and 5) information manipulation during data transmission. In this article, we introduce a practical and secure system to address the above problems. Our system provides fine-grained access control with dynamic user groups for optimizing scalability and functionality. We prove that our system is secure against numerous real-world threats. Extensive comparison and experimental analysis demonstrate that our system enjoys superior performance than the state-of-the-art solutions.