Design of a secure privacy preserving cloud based framework for sharing electronic health data

Abstract

There exists a need for sharing user health data, especially with institutes for research purposes, in a secure fashion. This is especially true in the case of a system that includes a third party storage service, such as cloud computing, which limits the control of the data owner. The use of encryption for secure data storage continues to evolve to meet the need for flexible and fine-grained access control. This evolution has led to the development of Attribute Based Encryption (ABE). The use of ABE to ensure the security and privacy of health data has been explored. This thesis presents an ABE based framework which allows for the secure outsourcing of the more computationally intensive processes for data decryption to the cloud servers. This reduces the time needed for decryption to occur at the user end and reduces the amount of computational power needed by users to access data.