Securing electronic medical records using attribute-based encryption on mobile devices

Abstract

We provide a design and implementation of self-protecting electronic medical records (EMRs) using attribute-based encryption on mobile devices. Our system allows healthcare organizations to export EMRs to locations outside of their trust boundary. In contrast to previous approaches, our solution is designed to maintain EMR availability even when providers are offline, i.e., where network connectivity is not available. To balance the needs of emergency care and patient privacy, our system is designed to provide fine-grained encryption and is able to protect individual items within an EMR, where each encrypted item may have its own access control policy. We implemented a prototype system using a new key- and ciphertext-policy attribute-based encryption library that we developed. Our implementation, which includes an iPhone app for storing and managing EMRs offline, allows for flexible and automated policy generation. An evaluation of our design shows that our ABE library performs well, has acceptable storage requirements, and is practical and usable on modern smartphones.