Detection of Insider Attacks in Cloud Based e-Healthcare Environment

Abstract

In recent years, Cloud computing has been receiving great attention from various business and research organizations as it promises to provide large storage facilities and highly managed remote services. Due to its characteristics like on-demand self service, rapid elasticity, ubiquitous network access and resource pooling, it shows high potential for providing e-Healthcare solutions. It can offer various financial and functional benefits to e-Healthcare which includes providing storage flexibility for the rapidly growing healthcare data, reduced cost, better accessibility, improved quality of care and enhancement in medical research. However at the same time, it faces many technical challenges like privacy, reliability, security etc. In the Cloud based ehealthcare environment where the patient's data is transferred between entities, maintaining the security of data becomes a priority. Cryptographic techniques can only provide a secure channel of communication but it fails to provide security at end points. Security attacks may be accomplished by the malicious insider at the end points. A malicious insider may modify the patient's data resulting in a false examination. The paper provides a detective approach for such attacks in the healthcare organizations. Our work is focused with the detection of insider attacks for preventing false examination of patient's health records and assuring the accountability of data usage. Watermarking can be used for detection of modification by an insider attack but does not provide accountability of data usage. Hence our approach combines the functionalities of cryptographic techniques and watermarking together with an accountability framework for providing transparency of patient's data usage.