An Efficient and Secure Revocation-Enabled Attribute-Based Access Control for eHealth in Smart Society

Abstract

The ever-growing ecosystem of the Internet of Things (IoT) integrating with the ever-evolving wireless communication technology paves the way for adopting new applications in a smart society. The core concept of smart society emphasizes utilizing information and communication technology (ICT) infrastructure to improve every aspect of life. Among the variety of smart services, eHealth is at the forefront of these promises. eHealth is rapidly gaining popularity to overcome the insufficient healthcare services and provide patient-centric treatment for the rising aging population with chronic diseases. Keeping in view the sensitivity of medical data, this interfacing between healthcare and technology has raised many security concerns. Among the many contemporary solutions, attribute-based encryption (ABE) is the dominant technology because of its inherent support for one-to-many transfer and fine-grained access control mechanisms to confidential medical data. ABE uses costly bilinear pairing operations, which are too heavy for eHealth’s tiny wireless body area network (WBAN) devices despite its proper functionality. We present an efficient and secure ABE architecture with outsourcing intense encryption and decryption operations in this work. For practical realization, our scheme uses elliptic curve scalar point multiplication as the underlying technology of ABE instead of costly pairing operations. In addition, it provides support for attribute/users revocation and verifiability of outsourced medical data. Using the selective-set security model, the proposed scheme is secure under the elliptic curve decisional Diffie–Hellman (ECDDH) assumption. The performance assessment and top-ranked value via the help of fuzzy logic’s evaluation based on distance from average solution (EDAS) method show that the proposed scheme is efficient and suitable for access control in eHealth smart societies.

Keywords

• access control
• attribute-based encryption
• elliptic curve
• wireless body area networks
• smart society