Designing cloud-based electronic health record system with attribute-based encryption

Abstract

With the development of cloud computing, electronic health record (EHR) system has appeared in the form of patient-centric, in which patients store their personal health records (PHRs) at a remote cloud server and selectively share them with physicians for convenient medical care. Although the newly emerged form has many advantages over traditional client-server model, it inevitably introduces patients' concerns on the privacy of their PHRs due to the fact that cloud servers are very likely to be in a different trusted domain from that of the patients. In this paper, aiming at allowing for efficient storing and sharing PHRs and also eliminating patients' worries about PHR privacy, we design a secure cloud-based EHR system, which guarantees security and privacy of medical data stored in the cloud, relying on cryptographic primitive but not the full trust over cloud servers. Based on our proposed basic EHR system, we provide several extensions including adding searchability, supporting revocation functionality and enabling efficient local decryption, which fills the gap between theoretical proposal and practical application.