Privacy preserving content disclosure for enabling sharing of electronic health records in cloud computing

Abstract

Cloud computing has been gaining acceptance in various scenarios ranging from storing user's personal data to managing PHRs(Personal Health Records) as it facilitates data sharing. The major threat that hinders its wide deployment even today is the fear of losing privacy of the data stored on the cloud. Thus privacy preserving data sharing becomes an important concern for cloud users. The conventional encryption schemes cannot be directly applied in this scenario. A promising approach is to use ABE(Attribute Based Encryption) for the same. CP-ABE, a variant of ABE, can provide fine grained access control but one draw back of CP-ABE is that it focuses only on who accesses the data. To address this concern, we combine CP-ABE with Anonymization to enforce fine grained privacy preserved access control and data sharing among a group of cloud users. Although, this paper discusses on sharing EHRs, the concepts can be generalized and applied to other scenarios as well.