Enhancing Security in Personal Health Record

To assure the patients' control over access to their own PHRs, it is a promising method to encrypt the PHRs before outsourcing. In this paper, we propose a novel patient-centric framework and a suite of mechanisms for data access control to PHRs stored in semi-trusted servers. To achieve fine-grained and scalable data access control for PHRs, we leverage attribute based encryption (ABE) techniques to encrypt each patient's PHR file. To ensure patient-centric privacy control over their own PHRs, it is essential to have fine-grained data access control mechanisms that work with semi-trusted servers. In order to protect the personal health data stored on a semi-trusted server, we adopt attribute-based encryption (ABE) as the main encryption primitive. Using ABE, access policies are expressed based on the attributes of users or data, which enables a patient to selectively share her PHR among a set of users by encrypting the file under a set of attributes, without the need to know a complete list of users. We focus on the multiple data owner scenario, and divide the users in the PHR system into multiple security domains that greatly reduces the key management complexity for owners.