title: Fine-grained Database Field Search Using Attribute-Based Encryption for E-Healthcare Clouds.
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.
authors.affiliation: School of Software Technology, Dalian University of Technology, Dalian, China.|Key Laboratory for Ubiquitous Network and Service Software of Liaoning Province, Dalian, China.
authors.forename: Cheng
authors.initials: C
authors.lastname: Guo
authors.affiliation: School of Software Technology, Dalian University of Technology, Dalian, China.|Key Laboratory for Ubiquitous Network and Service Software of Liaoning Province, Dalian, China.
authors.forename: Ruhan
authors.initials: R
authors.lastname: Zhuang
authors.affiliation: School of Software Technology, Dalian University of Technology, Dalian, China.|Key Laboratory for Ubiquitous Network and Service Software of Liaoning Province, Dalian, China.
authors.forename: Yingmo
authors.initials: Y
authors.lastname: Jie
authors.affiliation: School of Cyberspace, Hangzhou Dianzi University, Hangzhou, China. renyz@hdu.edu.cn.|Key Laboratory of Complex Systems Modeling and Simulation, Ministry of Education of China, Hangzhou Dianzi University, Hangzhou, China. renyz@hdu.edu.cn.
authors.forename: Yizhi
authors.initials: Y
authors.lastname: Ren
authors.affiliation: School of Cyberspace, Hangzhou Dianzi University, Hangzhou, China. wuting@hdu.edu.cn.
authors.forename: Ting
authors.initials: T
authors.lastname: Wu
authors.affiliation: Department of Information Systems and Cyber Security, The University of Texas at San Antonio, San Antonio, TX, USA.|School of Information Technology and Mathematical Sciences, University of South Australia, Adelaide, Australia.|School of Computer Science, China University of Geosciences, Wuhan, China.
authors.forename: Kim-Kwang Raymond
authors.identifier: http://orcid.org/0000-0001-9208-5336
authors.initials: KR
authors.lastname: Choo
mesh_terms: D000067917:Cloud Computing; D016494:Computer Security / Q000295:instrumentation*; D003219:Confidentiality; D057286:Electronic Health Records / Q000295:instrumentation*; D006801:Humans; D016247:Information Storage and Retrieval; D017216:Telemedicine / Q000295:instrumentation*
keywords: Access control; Ciphertext-policy attribute-based encryption; Cloud computing; E-healthcare; Searchable encryption