Secure and Privacy-Preserving Querying of Personal Health Records in the Cloud

Abstract

International audiencePersonal Health Records (PHR) are user-friendly, online solutions that give patients a way of managing their own health information. Many of the current PHR systems allow storage providers to access patients’ data. Recently, architectures of storing PHRs in cloud have been proposed. However, privacy remains a major issue for patients. Consequently, it is a promising method to encrypt PHRs before outsourcing. Encrypting PHRs prevents health organizations from analyzing medical data. In this paper, we propose a protocol that would allow health organizations to produce statistical information about encrypted PHRs stored in the cloud. The protocol depends on two threshold homomorphic cryptosystems: Goldwasser-Micali (GM) and Paillier. It executes queries on Kd-trees that are constructed from encrypted health records. It also prevents patients from inferring what health organizations are concerned about. We experimentally evaluate the performance of the proposed protocol and report on the results of implementation

Technical and Economic Models for a Global Patient co-Owned Cloud (GPOC)

“…These ranged from blockchain technologies to other distributed graph-based ecosystems. [17][18][19][20][21][22][23][24][25][26][27][28][29][30][31][32][33][34][35][36] In our GPOC systematic review and meta-analysis, we also looked specifically at the technical requirements for the construction of a Global Patient co-Owned Cloud (GPOC), i.e., with a focus on the infrastructures used discussed below. A sandbox environment enables research into these and other emerging infrastructures.…”

“…Fully Homomorphic Encryption (FHE) is currently the most relevant to GPOC. 23,34,35,36 It supports analytics on encrypted data. 5 The most effective and ergonomic UX/UI is a science in itself.…”

“…28 Jiang and team conclude that centralised PHRs and outsourcing systems have critical security and privacy issues with wide concerns in both academia and industry. 29 In the GPOC Survey it was also evident that 63.67% (p=0.03096) disagreed with centralised ownership. In the survey, 93.3% (p=0.03996) of the leaders disagreed with selling the PHR data.…”

“…Our approach leverages a modular protocol architecture to serve as a way of unifying emerging technologies from across the globe with the intention of facilitating the development of new tools to support co-ownership. [17][18][19][20][21][22][23][24][25][26][27][28][29][30][31][32] The reason for a modular architecture is that stakeholders; patients, their families, clinicians, organisations, and governments have different regulatory requirements or preferences and can remove or add elements to support their respective needs. Such needs could be modelled as a consensus-based optimisation construct allowing the patient to be at the centre of the conversation with all stakeholder input through their personal health record.…”