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Fine-grained Database Field Search Using Attribute-Based Encryption for E-Healthcare Clouds

  • Mobile & Wireless Health
  • Published:
Journal of Medical Systems Aims and scope Submit manuscript

Abstract

An effectively designed e-healthcare system can significantly enhance the quality of access and experience of healthcare users, including facilitating medical and healthcare providers in ensuring a smooth delivery of services. Ensuring the security of patients’ electronic health records (EHRs) in the e-healthcare system is an active research area. EHRs may be outsourced to a third-party, such as a community healthcare cloud service provider for storage due to cost-saving measures. Generally, encrypting the EHRs when they are stored in the system (i.e. data-at-rest) or prior to outsourcing the data is used to ensure data confidentiality. Searchable encryption (SE) scheme is a promising technique that can ensure the protection of private information without compromising on performance. In this paper, we propose a novel framework for controlling access to EHRs stored in semi-trusted cloud servers (e.g. a private cloud or a community cloud). To achieve fine-grained access control for EHRs, we leverage the ciphertext-policy attribute-based encryption (CP-ABE) technique to encrypt tables published by hospitals, including patients’ EHRs, and the table is stored in the database with the primary key being the patient’s unique identity. Our framework can enable different users with different privileges to search on different database fields. Differ from previous attempts to secure outsourcing of data, we emphasize the control of the searches of the fields within the database. We demonstrate the utility of the scheme by evaluating the scheme using datasets from the University of California, Irvine.

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Acknowledgments

This paper is supported by the National Science Foundation of China under grant No. 61401060, 61501080 and 61572095, the general program of Liaoning Provincial Department of Education Science Research under grants L2014017, and the Fundamental Research Funds for the Central Universities’ under No. DUT16QY09.

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. School of Software Technology, Dalian University of Technology, Dalian, China

    Cheng Guo, Ruhan Zhuang & Yingmo Jie

  2. Key Laboratory for Ubiquitous Network and Service Software of Liaoning Province, Dalian, China

    Cheng Guo, Ruhan Zhuang & Yingmo Jie

  3. School of Cyberspace, Hangzhou Dianzi University, Hangzhou, China

    Yizhi Ren & Ting Wu

  4. Key Laboratory of Complex Systems Modeling and Simulation, Ministry of Education of China, Hangzhou Dianzi University, Hangzhou, China

    Yizhi Ren

  5. Department of Information Systems and Cyber Security, The University of Texas at San Antonio, San Antonio, TX, USA

    Kim-Kwang Raymond Choo

  6. School of Information Technology and Mathematical Sciences, University of South Australia, Adelaide, Australia

    Kim-Kwang Raymond Choo

  7. School of Computer Science, China University of Geosciences, Wuhan, China

    Kim-Kwang Raymond Choo

Authors
  1. Cheng Guo
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  2. Ruhan Zhuang
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  3. Yingmo Jie
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  4. Yizhi Ren
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  5. Ting Wu
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  6. Kim-Kwang Raymond Choo
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Corresponding authors

Correspondence to Yizhi Ren or Ting Wu.

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This article is part of the Topical Collection on Mobile and; Wireless Health

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Guo, C., Zhuang, R., Jie, Y. et al. Fine-grained Database Field Search Using Attribute-Based Encryption for E-Healthcare Clouds. J Med Syst 40, 235 (2016). https://doi.org/10.1007/s10916-016-0588-0

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  • DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s10916-016-0588-0

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