Secure approach to sharing digitized medical data in a cloud environment

Abstract

Without proper security mechanisms, medical records stored electronically can be accessed more easily than physical files. Patient health information is scattered throughout the hospital environment, including laboratories, pharmacies, and daily medical status reports. The electronic format of medical reports ensures that all information is available in a single place. However, it is difficult to store and manage large amounts of data. Dedicated servers and a data center are needed to store and manage patient data. However, self-managed data centers are expensive for hospitals. Storing data in a cloud is a cheaper alternative. The advantage of storing data in a cloud is that it can be retrieved anywhere and anytime using any device connected to the Internet. Therefore, doctors can easily access the medical history of a patient and diagnose diseases according to the context. It also helps prescribe the correct medicine to a patient in an appropriate way. The systematic storage of medical records could help reduce medical errors in hospitals. The challenge is to store medical records on a third-party cloud server while addressing privacy and security concerns. These servers are often semi-trusted. Thus, sensitive medical information must be protected. Open access to records and modifications performed on the information in those records may even cause patient fatalities. Patient-centric health-record security is a major concern. End-to-end file encryption before outsourcing data to a third-party cloud server ensures security. This paper presents a method that is a combination of the advanced encryption standard and the elliptical curve Diffie-Hellman method designed to increase the efficiency of medical record security for users. Comparisons of existing and proposed techniques are presented at the end of the article, with a focus on the analyzing the security approaches between the elliptic curve and secret-sharing methods. This study aims to provide a high level of security for patient health records.

Keywords

• Electronic medical records
• Cloud computing
• Data privacy
• Attribute-based encryption
• Authentication