PSMPA: PATIENT SELF-CONTROLLABLE AND MULTI-LEVEL PRIVACY-PRESERVING COOPERATIVE AUTHENTICATION IN DISTRIBUTED M-HEALTHCARE CLOUD COMPUTING SYSTEM

ABSTRACT:

The Distributed m-healthcare cloud computing system considerably facilitates secure and efficient patient treatment for medical consultation by sharing personal health information among the healthcare providers. This system should bring about the challenge of keeping both the data confidentiality and patients’ identity privacy simultaneously. Many existing access control and anonymous authentication schemes cannot be straightforwardly exploited. To solve the problem proposed a novel authorized accessible privacy model (AAPM) is established. Patients can authorize physicians by setting an access tree supporting flexible threshold predicates.

Our new technique of attribute based designated verifier signature, a patient self-controllable multi-level privacy preserving cooperative authentication scheme (PSMPA) realizing three levels of security and privacy requirement in distributed m-healthcare cloud computing system is proposed. The directly authorized physicians, the indirectly authorized physicians and the unauthorized persons in medical consultation can respectively decipher the personal health information and/or verify patients’ identities by satisfying the access tree with their own attribute sets.

INTRODUCTION:

Distributed m-healthcare cloud computing systems have been increasingly adopted worldwide including the European Commission activities, the US Health Insurance Portability and Accountability Act (HIPAA) and many other governments for efficient and high-quality medical treatment. In m-healthcare social networks, the personal health information is always shared among the patients located in respective social communities suffering from the same disease for mutual support, and across distributed healthcare providers (HPs) equipped with their own cloud servers for medical consultant. However, it also brings about a series of challenges, especially how to ensure the security and privacy of the patients’ personal health information from various attacks in the wireless communication channel such as eavesdropping and tampering As to the security facet, one of the main issues is access control of patients’ personal health information, namely it is only the authorized physicians or institutions that can recover the patients’ personal health information during the data sharing in the distributed m-healthcare cloud computing system. In practice, most patients are concerned about the confidentiality of their personal health information since it is likely to make them in trouble for each kind of unauthorized collection and disclosure.

Therefore, in distributed m-healthcare cloud computing systems, which part of the patients’ personal health information should be shared and which physicians their personal health information should be shared with have become two intractable problems demanding urgent solutions. There has emerged various research results focusing on them. A fine-grained distributed data access control scheme is proposed using the technique of attribute based encryption (ABE). A rendezvous-based access control method provides access privilege if and only if the patient and the physician meet in the physical world. Recently, a patient-centric and fine-grained data access control in multi-owner settings is constructed for securing personal health records in cloud computing. However, it mainly focuses on the central cloud computing system which is not sufficient for efficiently processing the increasing volume of personal health information in m-healthcare cloud computing system.

Moreover, it is not enough for to only guarantee the data confidentiality of the patient’s personal health information in the honest-but-curious cloud server model since the frequent communication between a patient and a professional physician can lead the adversary to conclude that the patient is suffering from a specific disease with a high probability. Unfortunately, the problem of how to protect both the patients’ data confidentiality and identity privacy in the distributed m-healthcare cloud computing scenario under the malicious model was left untouched.

In this paper, we consider simultaneously achieving data confidentiality and identity privacy with high efficiency. As is described in Fig. 1, in distributed m-healthcare cloud computing systems, all the members can be classified into three categories: the directly authorized physicians with green labels in the local healthcare provider who are authorized by the patients and can both access the patient’s personal health information and verify the patient’s identity and the indirectly authorized physicians with yellow labels in the remote healthcare providers who are authorized by the directly authorized physicians for medical consultant or some research purposes (i.e., since they are not authorized by the patients, we use the term ‘indirectly authorized’ instead). They can only access the personal health information, but not the patient’s identity. For the unauthorized persons with red labels, nothing could be obtained. By extending the techniques of attribute based access control and designated verifier signatures (DVS) on de-identified health information

LITRATURE SURVEY

SECURING PERSONAL HEALTH RECORDS IN CLOUD COMPUTING: PATIENT-CENTRIC AND FINE-GRAINED DATA ACCESS CONTROL IN MULTI-OWNER SETTINGS

AUTHOR: M. Li, S. Yu, K. Ren, and W. Lou

PUBLISH: Proc. 6th Int. ICST Conf. Security Privacy Comm. Netw., 2010, pp. 89–106.

EXPLANATION:

Online personal health record (PHR) enables patients to manage their own medical records in a centralized way, which greatly facilitates the storage, access and sharing of personal health data. With the emergence of cloud computing, it is attractive for the PHR service providers to shift their PHR applications and storage into the cloud, in order to enjoy the elastic resources and reduce the operational cost. However, by storing PHRs in the cloud, the patients lose physical control to their personal health data, which makes it necessary for each patient to encrypt her PHR data before uploading to the cloud servers. Under encryption, it is challenging to achieve fine-grained access control to PHR data in a scalable and efficient way. For each patient, the PHR data should be encrypted so that it is scalable with the number of users having access. Also, since there are multiple owners (patients) in a PHR system and every owner would encrypt her PHR files using a different set of cryptographic keys, it is important to reduce the key distribution complexity in such multi-owner settings. Existing cryptographic enforced access control schemes are mostly designed for the single-owner scenarios. In this paper, we propose a novel framework for access control to PHRs within cloud computing environment. To enable fine-grained and scalable access control for PHRs, we leverage attribute based encryption (ABE) techniques to encrypt each patients’ PHR data. To reduce the key distribution complexity, we divide the system into multiple security domains, where each domain manages only a subset of the users. In this way, each patient has full control over her own privacy, and the key management complexity is reduced dramatically.

PRIVACY AND EMERGENCY RESPONSE IN E-HEALTHCARE LEVERAGING WIRELESS BODY SENSOR NETWORKS

AUTHOR: J. Sun, Y. Fang, and X. Zhu

PUBLISH: IEEE Wireless Commun., vol. 17, no. 1, pp. 66–73, Feb. 2010.

EXPLANATION:

Electronic healthcare is becoming a vital part of our living environment and exhibits advantages over paper-based legacy systems. Privacy is the foremost concern of patients and the biggest impediment to e-healthcare deployment. In addressing privacy issues, conflicts from the functional requirements must be taken into account. One such requirement is efficient and effective response to medical emergencies. In this article, we provide detailed discussions on the privacy and security issues in e-healthcare systems and viable techniques for these issues. Furthermore, we demonstrate the design challenge in the fulfillment of conflicting goals through an exemplary scenario, where the wireless body sensor network is leveraged, and a sound solution is proposed to overcome the conflict.

HCPP: CRYPTOGRAPHY BASED SECURE EHR SYSTEM FOR PATIENT PRIVACY AND EMERGENCY HEALTHCARE

AUTHOR: J. Sun, X. Zhu, C. Zhang, and Y. Fang

PUBLISH: Proc. 31st Int. Conf. Distrib. Comput. Syst., 2011, pp. 373–382.

EXPLANATION:

Privacy concern is arguably the major barrier that hinders the deployment of electronic health record (EHR) systems which are considered more efficient, less error-prone, and of higher availability compared to traditional paper record systems. Patients are unwilling to accept the EHR system unless their protected health information (PHI) containing highly confidential data is guaranteed proper use and disclosure, which cannot be easily achieved without patients’ control over their own PHI. However, cautions must be taken to handle emergencies in which the patient may be physically incompetent to retrieve the controlled PHI for emergency treatment. In this paper, we propose a secure EHR system, HCPP (Healthcaresystem for Patient Privacy), based on cryptographic constructions and existing wireless network infrastructures, to provide privacy protection to patients under any circumstances while enabling timelyPHI retrieval for life-saving treatment in emergency situations. Furthermore, our HCPP system restricts PHI access to authorized (not arbitrary) physicians, who can be traced and held accountable if the accessed PHI is found improperly disclosed. Last but not least, HCPP leverages wireless network access to support efficient and private storage/retrieval of PHI, which underlies a secure and feasible EHR system.