An Efficient Cloud-Based Personal Health Records System Using Attribute-Based Encryption and Anonymous Multi-receiver Identity-Based Encryption

Abstract

As an emerging patient-centric model of health information exchange, cloud-based personal health record (PHR) system holds great promise for empowering patients and ensuring more effective delivery of health care. In this paper, we propose a novel patient-centric cloud-based secure PHR system, which allows patients to securely store their PHR data on the semi-trusted cloud service providers, and selectively share their PHR data with a wide range of users, including health care provider like doctors and nurses, family members or friends. To reduce the key management complexity for owners and users, we divide the users in the cloud-based PHR system into two security domains named public domain and personal domain. Different from previous cloud-based PHR system, PHR owners encrypt their PHR data for the public domain using cipher text-policy attribute-based encryption scheme, while they encrypt their PHR data for the personal domain using anonymous multi-receiver identity-based encryption scheme. Only authorized users whose credentials satisfy the specified cipher text-policy or whose identities belong to dedicated identities can decrypt the encrypted PHR data, where cipher text-policy or dedicated identities are embedded in the encrypted PHR data. Extensive analytical and experimental results are presented which show the patient-centric cloud-based secure PHR system is secure, scalable and efficient.