Cloud computing is emerging as a new computing paradigm in the healthcare sector besides other business domains. Large numbers of health organizations have started shifting the electronic health information to the cloud environment. Introducing the cloud services in the health sector not only facilitates the exchange of electronic medical records among the hospitals and clinics, but also enables the cloud to act as a medical record storage center. Moreover, shifting to the cloud environment relieves the healthcare organizations of the tedious tasks of infrastructure management and also minimizes development and maintenance costs. Nonetheless, storing the patient health data in the third-party servers also entails serious threats to data privacy. Because of probable disclosure of medical records stored and exchanged in the cloud, the patients' privacy concerns should essentially be considered when designing the security and privacy mechanisms. Various approaches have been used to preserve the privacy of the health information in the cloud environment. This survey aims to encompass the state-of-the-art privacy-preserving approaches employed in the e-Health clouds. Moreover, the privacy-preserving approaches are classified into cryptographic and noncryptographic approaches and taxonomy of the approaches is also presented. Furthermore, the strengths and weaknesses of the presented approaches are reported and some open issues are highlighted.

A Review on the State-of-the-Art Privacy-Preserving Approaches in the e-Health Clouds

A new construction of CP-ABE, named Privacy Preserving Constant CP-ABE (PPC-CP-ABE) that significantly reduces the ciphertext to a constant size with any given number of attributes is disclosed. PPCCP-ABE leverages a hidden policy construction such that the recipients' privacy is preserved efficiently. A Privacy Preserving Attribute Based Broadcast Encryption (PP-AB-BE) scheme is disclosed. PP-AB-BE is flexible because a broadcasted message can be encrypted by an expressive hidden access policy, either with or without explicit specifying the receivers. PP-AB-BE significantly reduces the storage and communication overhead. Also, PP-AB-BE attains minimal bound on storage overhead for each user to cover all possible subgroups in the communication system.

Efficient Privacy-Preserving Ciphertext-Policy Attribute Based Encryption and Broadcast Encryption

Lightweight devices, such as radio frequency identification tags, have a limited storage capacity, which has become a bottleneck for many applications, especially for security applications. Ciphertext-policy attribute-based encryption (CP-ABE) is a promising cryptographic tool, where the encryptor can decide the access structure that will be used to protect the sensitive data. However, current CP-ABE schemes suffer from the issue of having long decryption keys, in which the size is linear to and dependent on the number of attributes. This drawback prevents the use of lightweight devices in practice as a storage of the decryption keys of the CP-ABE for users. In this paper, we provide an affirmative answer to the above long standing issue, which will make the CP-ABE very practical. We propose a novel CP-ABE scheme with constant-size decryption keys independent of the number of attributes. We found that the size can be as small as 672 bits. In comparison with other schemes in the literature, the proposed scheme is the only CP-ABE with expressive access structures, which is suitable for CP-ABE key storage in lightweight devices.

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CP-ABE With Constant-Size Keys for Lightweight Devices

Attribute-based encryption provides good solutions to the problem of anonymous access control by specifying access policies among private keys or ciphertexts over encrypted data. In ciphertext-policy attribute-based encryption (CP-ABE), each user is associated with a set of attributes, and data is encrypted with access structures on attributes. A user is able to decrypt a ciphertext if and only if his attributes satisfy the ciphertext access structure. CP-ABE is very appealing since the ciphertext and data access policies are integrated together in a natural and effective way.

Most current CP-ABE schemes incur large ciphertext size and computation costs in the encryption and decryption operations which depend at least linearly on the number of attributes involved in the access policy. In this paper, we present two new CP-ABE schemes, which have both constant-size ciphertext and constant computation costs for a nonmonotone AND gate access policy, under chosen plaintext and chosen ciphertext attacks. The security of first scheme can be proven CPA-secure in standard model under the decision n-BDHE assumption. And the security of second scheme can be proven CCA-secure in standard model under the decision n-BDHE assumption and the existence of collision-resistant hash functions. Our scheme can also be extended to the decentralizing multi-authority setting.

Efficient ciphertext policy attribute-based encryption with constant-size ciphertext and constant computation-cost

We propose two new ciphertext policy attribute-based encryption (CP-ABE) schemes where the access policy is defined by AND-gate with wildcard. In the first scheme, we present a new technique that uses only one group element to represent an attribute, while the existing ABE schemes of the same type need to use three different group elements to represent an attribute for the three possible values (namely, positive, negative, and wildcard). Our new technique leads to a new CP-ABE scheme with constant ciphertext size, which, however, cannot hide the access policy used for encryption. The main contribution of this paper is to propose a new CP-ABE scheme with the property of hidden access policy by extending the technique we used in the construction of our first scheme. In particular, we show a way to bridge ABE based on AND-gate with wildcard with inner product encryption and then use the latter to achieve the goal of hidden access policy. We prove that our second scheme is secure under the standard decisional linear and decisional bilinear Diffie-Hellman assumptions.

Hidden ciphertext policy attribute-based encryption under standard assumptions

Existing CP-ABE schemes incur very large ciphertext size, which increases linearly with respect to the number of attributes in the access policy. Large ciphertext prevents CP-ABE from being adopted in the communication constrained environments. In this paper, we proposed a new construction of CP-ABE, named Constant-size CP-ABE (denoted as CCP-ABE) that significantly reduces the ciphertext to a constant size for an AND gate access policy with any given number of attributes. Each ciphertext in CCP-ABE requires only elements on a bilinear group.Based on CCP-ABE, we further proposed an Attribute Based Broadcast Encryption (ABBE) scheme. Compared to existing Broadcast Encryption (BE) schemes, ABBE is more flexible because a broadcasted message can be encrypted by an expressive access policy, either with or without explicit specifying the receivers. Moreover, ABBE significantly reduces the storage and communication overhead to the order of $O(\log N)$, where $N$ is the system size.

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Zhibin Zhou

Papers

On efficient ciphertext-policy attribute based encryption and broadcast encryption: extended abstract