Neurocomputing 274 (2018) 99–105
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Neurocomputing
journal homepage: www.elsevier.com/locate/neucom
Secure and efficient querying over personal health records in cloud
computing
R
Xuejiao Liu
a , ∗
, Yingjie Xia
b
, Wei Yang
c , d
, Fengli Yang
a
a
Institute of Service Engineering, Hangzhou Normal University, China
b
College of Computer Science and Technology, Zhejiang University, China
c
State Key Laboratory of Information Engineering in Surveying, Mapping and Remote Sensing, Wuhan University, China
d
Department of Engineering, Institute of No. 145 Erqi Road, China
a r t i c l e i n f o
Article history:
Received 16 March 2016
Revised 9 June 2016
Accepted 19 June 2016
Available online 11 April 2017
Keywords:
Efficient querying
CP-ABE
Cloud computing
PHR
a b s t r a c t
Information seeking is becoming an indispensable activity in daily life, especially in the medical cloud.
Body Area Network (BAN) is becoming more and more popular with respect to the development and
popularity of mobile devices. People are starting to back up the medical data to cloud, make data acces-
sible by the doctors from almost anywhere using mobile terminals. In this paper, we present an efficient
and secure fine-grained access control scheme which not only achieves authorized users to access the
records in cloud storage, but also supports a small set of physicians to write on the records. In order to
improve the efficiency, we put forward a novel technique called match-then-decrypt, which is used to
perform the decryption test without decryption. Also, the scheme outsources bilinear pairing operations
to a gateway without revealing the data content, and thus largely eliminates this overhead for users to a
great extent. The performance assessments demonstrate the efficiency of our proposed solution in terms
of computation, communication, and storage.
© 2017 Elsevier B.V. All rights reserved.
1.
Introduction
The modern technology-savvy world is full of devices compris-
ing sensors, actuators, and data processors. Data streams com-
ing from these devices will challenge the traditional approaches
to data security management and contribute to the emerging
paradigm of big data [1,2] . With the development of wearable sen-
sor nodes and wireless sensor network, there are many medical
records generating. These medical records serve as a systematic
collection of personal health information, including health moni-
toring data, lab tests, images, diagnoses, prescriptions and medical
histories, and they are appeared to be controlled by users them-
selves, in which users store their own health records, and share
them selectively with physicians for medical care. Although users
would like to share daily life on social networks [3,4] , however,
they may not feel comfortable to share personal health records
with the public. Therefore, it is highly desired to develop such a
scheme to keep users’ records secure.
Nowadays, more and more electronic health records (EHRs)
systems are increasingly using cloud storage service (e.g., Google
R
Fully documented templates are available in the elsarticle package on CTAN .
∗
Corresponding author.
E-mail address: liuxuejiao0406@163.com (X. Liu).
Health) for storing and retrieving the records to enhance inter-
operability, which can avoid exposing people to additional exam-
ination and unnecessary costs. Data sharing in EHRs systems is
important for improving the quality of healthcare delivery. How-
ever, data sharing has raised some security and privacy concerns
by putting the sensitive health data in third party cloud service
providers, because healthcare data could be potentially accessible
by a variety of users, which could lead to privacy exposure of pa-
tients [5,6] . In existing EHRs systems, records in data storage server
are either not protected at all, or they are bulk encrypted [7] . Tra-
ditional encryption schemes can not support complex and flexible
encryption scheme that corresponds to different users on the large
number of records in cloud service provider. For example, patients
want to enforce doctors to access medical histories for further di-
agnoses, and specify nurses to access the records in order to take
care of him/her. Therefore, it is essential to enforce efficient data
querying and sharing for securing electronic medical records in
cloud computing [8] .
In order to guarantee data confidentiality, it is important to
strictly restrict the access to sensitive health records in the cloud
service provider, and prevent unauthorized users from obtaining
the data. Since data is important for patients, data modification
should be verified to prevent unauthorized members from modi-
fying the data. Thus access to medical data should be governed by
http://dx.doi.org/10.1016/j.neucom.2016.06.100
0925-2312/© 2017 Elsevier B.V. All rights reserved.