Ensuring Fine-Grained Authorized Access Control for Healthcare Applications on Cloud Provisioned Platform

Abstract

In a cloud provisioned medical healthcare system, it is very important to ensure that resources and sensitive information (such as prescriptions, medical records and lab test data, etc) are accessed by and provided to authorized users and tenants whenever needed to be accessed. By using Attribute-Based Access Control (ABAC), not only role of the user but also other attributes, such as which resources he is allowed to access, what actions he is allowed to perform on those resources, what time of the date, whether he is at office or not and so on, are used for the fine-grained access control decision. Global policies are also needed to access and protect patient information from unauthorized access and to provide privacy. This ensures who can access what, under what conditions, and for what purpose. In the proposed system, XACML 3.0 standard is implemented to develop a prototype application. Through cloud computing platform (WSO2 Servers), the system can support the patients and healthcare workers to access the digital health records in hospitals easily by ensuring the patient's privacy and access to information.