Cloud Computing: Scalable and Secure Sharing of Personal Health Records Using Attribute-Based Encryption

IDL - International Digital Library Of
Technology & Research
Volume 1, Issue 3, April 2017 Available at: www.dbpublications.org
International e-Journal For Technology And Research-2017
IDL - International Digital Library 1 | P a g e Copyright@IDL-2017
Cloud Computing: Scalable and Secure
Sharing of Personal Health Records Using
Attribute-Based Encryption
Ms. Pavithra B1
, Ms. Ramyashree K V2
, Ms. Reshma L3
, Ms. Sadhana A T4
Mrs. Sujatha Joshi5
Dept. of Computer Science
Student– NMIT Bangalore, Karnataka, India 1, 2, 3, 4
Assistant Professor NMIT Bangalore, Karnataka, India 5
ABSTRACT:
Personal health record (PHR) is an emerging patient-
centric model of health information exchange, which
is often outsourced to be stored at a third party, such
as cloud providers. However, there have been wide
privacy concerns as personal health information
could be exposed to those third party servers and to
unauthorized parties. To assure the patients’ control
over access to their own PHRs, it is a promising
method to encrypt the PHRs before outsourcing. Yet,
issues such as risks of privacy exposure, scalability in
key management, flexible access, and efficient user
revocation, have remained the most important
challenges toward achieving fine-grained,
cryptographically enforced data access control. In
this paper, we propose a novel patient-centric
framework and a suite of mechanisms for data access
control to PHRs stored in semi trusted servers. To
achieve fine-grained and scalable data access control
for PHRs, we leverage attribute-based encryption
(ABE) techniques to encrypt each patient’s PHR file.
Different fr previous works in secure data
outsourcing, we focus on the multiple data owner
scenario, and divide the users in the PHR system into
multiple security domains that greatly reduces the
key management complexity for owners and users. A
high degree of patient privacy is guaranteed
simultaneously by exploiting multi authority ABE.
Our scheme also enables dynamic modification of
access policies or file attributes, supports efficient
on-demand user/attribute revocation and break-glass
access under emergency scenarios. Extensive
analytical and experimental results are presented

which show the security, scalability, and efficiency of
our proposed scheme.
1 INTRODUCTION
IN recent years, personal health record (PHR) has
emerged as a patient-centric model of health
information exchange.
A PHR service allows a patient to create, manage,
and control her personal health data in one place
through the web, which has made the storage,
retrieval, and sharing of the medical information
more efficient. Especially, each patient is promised
the full control of her medical records and can share
her health data with a wide range of users, including
healthcare providers, family members or friends. Due
to the high cost of building and maintaining
specialized data centers, many PHR services are
outsourced to or provided by third-party service
providers, for example, Microsoft HealthVault.1
Recently, architectures of storing PHRs in cloud
computing have been proposed in [2], [3]. While it is
exciting to have convenient PHR services for
everyone, there are many security and privacy risks
which could impede its wide adoption. The main
concern is about whether the patients could actually
control the sharing of their sensitive personal health
information (PHI), especiall when they are stored on
a third-party server which people may not fully trust.
On the one hand, although there exist healthcare
regulations such as HIPAA which is recentl amended
to incorporate business associates [4], cloud
providers are usually not covered entities [5]. On the
other hand, due to the high value of the sensitive PHI,
the third party storage servers are often the targets of
various malicious behaviors which may lead to
exposure of the PHI. As a famous incident, a
Department of Veterans Affairs database containing
sensitive PHI of 26.5 million military veterans,
including their social security numbers and health
problems was stolen by an employee who took the
data home without authorization [6]. To ensure
patient-centric privacy control over their own PHRs,
it is essential to have fine-grained data access control
mechanisms that work with semitrusted servers. A
feasible and promising approach would be to encrypt
the data before outsourcing. Basically, thePHRowner
herself should decide how to encrypt her files and to
allow which set of users to obtain access to each file.
A PHR file should only be available to the users who
are given the corresponding decryption key, while
remain confidential to the rest of users. Furthermore,
the patient shall always retain the right to not only
grant, but also revoke access privileges when they
feel it is necessary [7]. However, the goal of patient-
centric privacy is often in conflict with scalability in
a PHR system. The authorized users may either need
to access the PHR for personal use or professional
purposes. Examples of the former are family member
and friends, while the latter can be medical doctors,
pharmacists, and researchers, etc. We refer to the two
categories of users as personal and professional users,
respectively. The latter has potentially large scale;
should each owner herself be directly responsible for
managing all the professional users, she will easily be
overwhelmed by the key management overhead. In
addition, since those users’ access requests are
generally unpredictable, it is difficult for an owner to
determine a list of them. On the other hand, different

from the single data owner scenario considered in
most of the existing works [8], [9], in a PHR system,
there are multiple owners who may encrypt according
to their own ways, possibly using different sets of
cryptographic keys. Letting each user obtain keys
from every owner whose PHR she wants to read
would limit the accessibility since patients are not
always online. An alternative is to employ a central
authority (CA) to do the key management on behalf
of all PHR owners, but this requires too much trust
on a single authority (i.e., cause the key escrow
problem). In this paper, we endeavor to study the
patient-centric, secure sharing of PHRs stored on
semi trusted servers, and focus on addressing the
complicated and challenging key management issues.
In order to protect the personal health data stored on
a semi trusted server, we adopt attribute based
encryption (ABE) as the main encryption primitive.
Using ABE, access policies are expressed based on
the attributes of users or data, which enables a patient
to selectively share her PHR among a set of users by
encrypting the file under a set of attributes, without
the need to know a complete list of users. The
complexities per encryption, key generation, and
decryption are only linear with the number of
attributes involved. However, to integrate ABE into a
large-scale PHR system, important issues such as key
management scalability, dynamic policy updates, and
efficient on-demand revocation are nontrivial to
solve, and remain largely open up-to-date. To this
end, we make the following main contributions:
1. We propose a novel ABE-based framework for
patient-centric secure sharing of PHRs in cloud
computing environments, under the multiowner
settings. To address the key management challenges,
we conceptually divide the users in the system into
two types of domains, namely public and personal
domains (PSDs). In particular, the majority
professional users are managed distributive by
attribute authorities in the former, while each owner
only needs to manage the keys of a small number of
users in her personal domain. In this way, our
framework can simultaneously handle different types
of PHR sharing applications’ requirements, while
incurring minimal key management overhead for
both owners and users in the system. In addition, the
framework enforces write access control, handles
dynamic policy updates, and provides break-glass
access to PHRs under emergence scenarios.
2. In the public domain, we use multi authority ABE
(MA-ABE) to improve the security and avoid key
escrow problem. Each attribute authority (AA) in it
governs a disjoint subset of user role attributes, while
none of them alone is able to control the security of
the whole system. We propose mechanisms for key
distribution and encryption so that PHR owners can
specify personalized fine-grained role-based access
policies during file encryption. In the personal
domain, owners directly assign access privileges for
personal users and encrypt a PHR file under its data
attributes. Furthermore, we enhance MA-ABE by
putting forward an efficient and on-demand user/
attribute revocation scheme, and prove its security
under standard security assumptions. In this way,
patients have full privacy control over their PHRs.
3. We provide a thorough analysis of the complexity
and scalability of our proposed secure PHR sharing
solution, in terms of multiple metrics in computation,

communication, storage, and key management. We
also compare our scheme to several previous ¸ones in
complexity, scalability and security. Furthermore, we
demonstrate the efficiency of our scheme by
implementing it on a modern workstation and
performing experiments/simulations. Compared with
the preliminary version of this paper [1], there are
several main additional contributions: 1) We clarify
and extend our usage of MA-ABE in the public
domain, and formally show how and which types of
user-defined file access policies are realized. 2) We
clarify the proposed revocable MA-ABE scheme, and
provide a formal security proof for it. 3) We carry out
both real-world experiments and simulations to
evaluate the performance of the proposed solution in
this paper.
2 RELATED WORK
This paper is mostly related to works in
cryptographically enforced access control for
outsourced data and attribute based encryption. To
realize fine-grained access control, the traditional
public key encryption (PKE)-based schemes [8], [10]
either incur high key management overhead, or
require encrypting multiple copies of a file using
different users’ keys. To improve upon the scalability
of the above solutions, one-to-many encryption
methods such as ABE can be used. In Goyal et al.’s
seminal paper on ABE [11], data are encrypted under
a set of attributes so that multiple users who possess
proper keys can decrypt. This potentially makes
encryption and key management more efficient [12].
A fundamental property of ABE is preventing against
user collusion. In addition, the encryptor is not
required to know the ACL.
2.1 ABE for Fine-Grained Data Access Control
A number of works used ABE to realize fine-grained
access control for outsourced data [13], [14], [9],
[15]. Especially, there has been an increasing interest
in applying ABE to secure electronic healthcare
records (EHRs). Recently, Narayan et al. proposed an
attribute-based infrastructure for EHR systems,
where each patient’s EHR files are encrypted using a
broadcast variant of CP-ABE [16] that allows direct
revocation. However, the cipher text length variant of
ABE that allows delegation of access rights is
proposed for encrypted EHRs. Ibraimi et al. [18]
applied cipher text policy ABE (CP-ABE) [19] to
manage the sharing of PHRs, and introduced the
concept of social/professional domains. In [20],
Akinyele et al. investigated using ABE to generate
self-protecting EMRs, which can either be stored on
cloud servers or cell phones so that EMR could be
accessed when the health provider is offline.
However, there are several common drawbacks of the
above works. First, they usually assume the use of a
single trusted authority (TA) in the system. This not
only may create a load bottleneck, but also suffers
from the key escrow problem since the TA can access
all the encrypted files, opening the door for potential
privacy exposure. In addition, it is not practical to
delegate all attribute management tasks to one TA,
including certifying all users’ attributes or roles and
generating secret keys. In fact, different organizations
usually form their own (sub)domains and become
suitable authorities to define and certify different sets
of attributes belonging to their (sub)domains (i.e.,
divide and rule). For example, a professional
association would be responsible for certifying

medical specialties, while a regional health provider
would certify the job ranks of its staffs. Second, there
still lacks an efficient and on-demand user revocation
mechanism for ABE with the support for dynamic
policy updates/changes, which are essential parts of
secure PHR sharing. Finally, most of the existing
works do not differentiate between the personal and
public domains (PUDs), which have different
attribute definitions, key management requirements,
and scalability issues. Our idea of conceptually
dividing the system into two types of domains is
similar with that in [18]; however, a key difference is
in [18] a single TA is still assumed to govern the
whole professional domain.
Recently, Yu et al. (YWRL) applied key-policy ABE
to secure outsourced data in the cloud [9], [15],
where a single data owner can encrypt her data and
share with multiple authorized users, by distributing
keys to them that contain attribute-based access
privileges. They also propose a method for the data
owner to revoke a user efficiently by delegating the
updates of affected cipher texts and user secret keys
to the cloud server. Since the key update operations
can be aggregated over time, their scheme achieves
low amortized overhead. However, in the YWRL
scheme, the data owner is also a TA at the same time.
It would be inefficient to be applied to a PHR system
with multiple data owners and users, because then
each user would receive many keys from multiple
owners, even if the keys contain the same sets of
attributes. On the other hand, Chase and Chow [21]
proposed a multiple-authority ABE (CC MA-ABE)
solution in which multiple TAs, each governing a
different subset of the system’s users’ attributes,
generate user secret keys collectively. A user needs to
obtain one part of her key from each TA. This
scheme prevents against collusion among at most N _
2 TAs, in addition to user collusion resistance.
However, it is not clear how to realize efficient user
revocation. In addition, since CC MA-ABE embeds
the access policy in users’ keys rather than the cipher
text, a direct application of it to a PHR system is non
intuitive, as it is not clear how to allow data owners
to specify their file access policies.
We give detailed overviews to the YWRL scheme
and CC MA-ABE scheme in the supplementary
material, which can be found on the Computer
SocietyDigitalLibrary
TABLE 1
Frequently Used Notations
2.2 Revocable ABE
It is a well-known challenging problem to revoke
users/ attributes efficiently and on-demand in ABE.
Traditionally, this is often done by the authority
broadcasting periodic key updates to unrevoked users
frequently [13], [22], which does not achieve

complete backward/forward security and is less
efficient. Recently, [23] and [24] proposed two CP-
ABE schemes with immediate attribute revocation
capability, instead of periodical revocation. However,
they were not designed for MA-ABE. In addition,
Ruj et al. [25] proposed an alternative solution for the
same problem in our paper using Lewko and
Waters’s (LW) decentralized ABE scheme [26]. The
main advantage of their solution is, each user can
obtain secret keys from any subset of the TAs in the
system, in contrast to the CC MAABE. The LW ABE
scheme enjoys better policy expressiveness, and it is
extended by [25] to support user revocation. On the
downside, the communication overhead of key
revocation is still high, as it requires a data owner to
transmit an updated cipher text component to every
nonrevoked user. They also do not differentiate
personal and public domains. In this paper, we bridge
the above gaps by proposing a unified security
framework for patient-centric sharing of PHRs in a
multidomain, multiauthority PHR system with many
users. The framework captures application-level
requirements of both public and personal use of a
patient’s PHRs, and distributes users’ trust to
multiple authorities that better reflects reality. We
also propose a suite of access control mechanisms by
uniquely combining the technical strengths of both
CC MA-ABE [21] and the YWRL ABE scheme [9].
Using our scheme, patients can choose and enforce
their own access policy for each PHR file, and can
revoke a user without involving high overhead. We
also implement part of our solution in a prototype
PHR system.
3 FRAMEWORK FOR PATIENT-
CENTRIC, SECURE AND SCALABLE PHR
SHARING
In this section, we describe our novel patient-centric
secure data sharing framework for cloud-based PHR
systems. The main notations are summarized in
Table1.
3.1 Problem Definition
We consider a PHR system where there are multiple
PHR owners and PHR users. The owners refer to
patients who have full control over their own PHR
data, i.e., they can create, manage, and delete it.
There is a central server belonging to the PHR
service provider that stores all the owners’ PHRs.
The users may come from various aspects; for
example, a friend, a caregiver or a researcher. Users
access the PHR documents through the server in
order to read or write to someone’s PHR, and a user
can simultaneously have access to multiple owners’
data. A typical PHR system uses standard data
formats. For example, continuity-of-care (CCR)
(based on XML data structure), which is widely used
in representative PHR systems including Indivo [27],
an open-source PHR system adopted by Boston
Children’s Hospital. Due to the nature of XML,
thePHRfiles are logically organized by their
categories in a hierarchical way [8], [20].
3.1.1 Security Model
In this paper, we consider the server to be
semitrusted, i.e., honest but curious as those in [28]
and [15]. That means the server will try to find out as
much secret information in the stored PHR files as

possible, but they will honestly follow the protocol in
general. On the other hand, some users will also try
to access the files beyond their privileges. For
example, a pharmacy may want to obtain the
prescriptions of patients for marketing and boosting
its profits. To do so, they may collude with other
users, or even with the server. In addition, we assume
each party in our system is preloaded with a
public/private key pair, and entity authentication can
be done by traditional challenge-response protocols.
3.1.2 Requirements
To achieve ―patient-centric‖ PHR sharing, a core
requirement is that each patient can control who are
authorized to access to her own PHR documents.
Especially, user-controlled read/write access and
revocation are the two core security objectives for
any electronic health record system, pointed out by
Mandl et al. [7] in as early as 2001. The security and
performance requirements are summarized as
follows:
. Data confidentiality. Unauthorized users (including
the server) who do not possess enough attributes
satisfying the access policy or do not have proper key
access privileges should be prevented from
decrypting a PHR document, even under user
collusion. Fine-grained access control should be
enforced, meaning different users are authorized to
read different sets of documents.
. On-demand revocation. Whenever a user’s attribute
is no longer valid, the user should not be able to
access future PHR files using that attribute. This is
usually called attribute revocation, and the
corresponding security property is forward secrecy
[23]. There is also user revocation, where all of a
user’s access privileges are revoked.
. Write access control. We shall prevent the
unauthorized contributors to gain write-access to
owners’ PHRs, while the legitimate contributors
should access the server with accountability.
. The data access policies should be flexible, i.e.,
dynamic changes to the predefined policies shall be
allowed, especially the PHRs should be accessible
under emergency scenarios.
. Scalability, efficiency, and usability. The PHR
system should support users from both the personal
domain and public domains. Since the set of users
from the public domain may be large in size and
unpredictable, the system should be highly scalable,
in terms of complexity in key management,
communication, computation and storage.
Additionally, the owners’ efforts in managing users
and keys should be minimized to enjoy usability.
3.2 Overview of Our Framework
The main goal of our framework is to provide secure
patient-centric PHR access and efficient key
management at the same time. The key idea is to
divide the system into multiple security domains
(namely, public domains and personal domains)
according to the different users’ data access
requirements. The PUDs consist of users who make
access based on their professional roles, such as
doctors, nurses, and medical researchers. In practice,
a PUD can be mapped to an independent sector in the
society, such as the health care, government, or
insurance sector. For each PSD, its users are

personally associated with a data owner (such as
family members or close friends), and they make
accesses to PHRs based on access rights assigned by
the owner. In both types of security domains, we
utilize ABE to realize cryptographically enforced,
patient-centric PHR access. Especially, in a PUD
multiauthority ABE is used, in which there are
multiple ―attribute authorities‖ (AAs), each
governing a disjoint subset of attributes. Role
attributes are defined for PUDs, representing the
professional role or obligations of a PUD user. Users
in PUDs obtain their attribute-based secret keys from
the AAs, without directly interacting with the owners.
To control access from PUD users, owners are free to
specify role-based fine-grained access policies for her
PHR files, while do not need to know the list of
authorized users when doing encryption. Since the
PUDs contain the majority of users, it greatly reduces
the key management overhead for both the owners
and users. Each data owner (e.g., patient) is a trusted
authority of her own PSD, who uses a KP-ABE
system to manage the secret keys and access rights of
users in her PSD. Since the users are personally
known by the PHR owner, to realize patientcentric
access, the owner is at the best position to grant user
access privileges on a case-by-case basis. For PSD,
data attributes are defined which refer to the intrinsic
properties of the PHR data, such as the category of a
PHR file. For the purpose of PSD access, each PHR
file is labeled with its data attributes, while the key
size is only linear with the number of file categories a
user can access. Since the number of users in a PSD is
often small, it reduces the burden for the owner.
When encrypting the data for PSD, all that the owner
needs to know is the intrinsic data properties. The multi
domain approach best models different user types and
access requirements in a PHR system. The use of ABE
makes the encrypted PHRs self-protective, i.e., they
can be accessed by only authorized users even when
storing on a semitrusted server, and when the owner
is not online.
Fig. 1. The proposed framework for patient-
centric, secure and scalable PHR sharing on
semitrusted storage under multiowner settings.
In addition, efficient and on-demand user revocation
is made possible via our ABE enhancements.

3.3 Details of the Proposed Framework
In our framework, there are multiple SDs, multiple
owners, multiple AAs, and multiple users. In
addition, two ABE systems are involved: for each
PSD the YWRL’s revocable KP-ABE scheme [9] is
adopted; for each PUD, our proposed revocable MA-
ABE scheme (described in Section 4) is used.
The framework is illustrated in Fig. 1. We term the
users having read and write access as data readers
and contributors, respectively.
System setup and key distribution. The system first
defines a common universe of data attributes shared
by every PSD, such as ―basic profile,‖ ―medical
history,‖ ―allergies,‖ and ―prescriptions.‖ An
emergency attribute is also defined for break-glass
access. Each PHR owner’s client application
generates its corresponding public/master keys.
The public keys can be published via user’s profile in
an online healthcare social-network (HSN) (which
could be part of the PHR service; e.g., the Indivo
system [27]). There are two ways for distributing
secret keys. First, when first using the PHR service, a
PHR owner can specify the access privilege of a data
reader in her PSD, and let her application generate
and distribute corresponding key to the latter, in a
way resembling invitations in GoogleDoc. Second, a
reader in PSD could obtain the secret key by sending
a request (indicating which types of files she wants to
access) to the PHR owner via HSN, and the owner
will grant her a subset of requested data types. Based
Fig. 2. The attribute hierarchy of files—leaf nodes are
atomic file categories while internal nodes are
compound categories. Dark boxes are the categories
that a PSD’s data reader have access to.
on that, the policy engine of the application
automatically derives an access structure, and runs
keygen of KP-ABE to generate the user secret key
that embeds her access structure. In addition, the data
attributes can be organized in a hierarchical manner
for efficient policy generation, see Fig. 2. When the
user is granted all the file types under a category, her
access privilege will be represented by that category
instead.
For the PUDs, the system defines role attributes, and
reader in a PUD obtains secret key from AAs, which

TABLE 2
Sample Secret Keys and Key-Policies for Three Public
Users in the Health Care Domain
binds the user to her claimed attributes/roles. For
example, a physician in it would receive ―hospital A,
physician, M.D., internal medicine‖ as her attributes
from the AAs. In practice, there exist multiple AAs
each governing a different subset of role attributes.
For instance, hospital staffs shall have a different AA
from pharmacy specialists. This is reflected by (1) in
Fig. 1. MA-ABE is used to encrypt the data, and the
concrete mechanism will be presented in Section 4.
In addition, the AAs distribute write keys that permit
contributors in their PUD to write to some patients’
PHR (2). PHR encryption and access. The owners
upload ABEencrypted PHR files to the server (3).
Each owner’s PHR file is encrypted both under a
certain fine-grained and rolebased access policy for
users from the PUD to access, and under a selected
set of data attributes that allows access from users in
the PSD. Only authorized users can decrypt the PHR
files, excluding the server. For improving efficiency,
the data attributes will include all the intermediate
file types from a leaf node to the root. For example,
in Fig. 2, an ―allergy‖ file’s attributes are fPHR;
medical history; allergyg. The data readers download
PHR files from the server, and they can decrypt the
files only if they have suitable attribute-based keys
(5). The data contributors will be granted write access
to someone’s PHR, if they present proper write keys
(4). User revocation. Here, we consider revocation of
a data reader or her attributes/access privileges. There
are several possible cases:
1. revocation of one or more role attributes of a
public domain user;
2. revocation of a public domain user which is
equivalent to revoking all of that user’s attributes.
These operations are done by the AA that the user
belongs to, where the actual computations can be
delegated to the server to improve efficiency (8).
3. Revocation of a personal domain user’s access
privileges;
4. revocation of a personal domain user. These can be
initiated through the PHR owner’s client application
in a similar way.
Policy updates. A PHR owner can update her sharing
policy for an existing PHR document by updating the
attributes (or access policy) in the cipher text. The
supported operations include add/delete/modify,
which can be done by the server on behalf of the
user. Break-glass. When an emergency happens, the
regular access policies may no longer be applicable.
To handle this situation, break-glass access is needed
to access the victim’s PHR. In our framework, each
owner’s PHR’s access right is also delegated to an
emergency department (ED, (6)). To prevent from
abuse of break-glass option, the emergency staff
needs to contact the ED to verify her identity and
theemergency situation, and obtain temporary read
keys (7).
After the emergency is over, the patient can revoke
the emergent access via the ED. An example. Here,
we demonstrate how our framework works using a

concrete example. Suppose PHR owner Alice is a
patient associated with hospital A. After she creates a
PHR file F1 (labeled as ―PHR; medical history;
allergy; emergency‖ in Fig. 2), she first encrypts it
according to both F1’s data labels (under the YWRL
KP-ABE), and a rolebased file access policy P1
(under our revocable MA-ABE).
This policy can be decided based on recommended
settings by the system, or Alice’s own preference. It
may look like
P1 :¼ ‘‘ðprofession ¼ physicianÞ
^ ðspecialty ¼ internal medicineÞ
^ ðorganization ¼ hospital AÞ’’:
She also sends the break-glass key to the ED. In
addition, Alice determines the access rights of users
in her PSD, which can be done either online or
offline. For example, she may approve her friend
Bob’s request to access files with labels fpersonal
infog or fmedical historyg. Her client application will
distribute a secret key with the access structure
ðpersonal info _ medical historyÞ to Bob. When Bob
wants to access another file F2 with labels ―PHR—
medical history—medications,‖ he is able to decrypt
F2 due to the ―medical history‖ attribute. For another
user Charlie who is a physician specializing in
internal medicine in hospital B in the PUD, he
obtains his secret key from multiple AAs such as the
American Medical Association (AMA), the
American Board of Medical Specialties (ABMS), and
the American Hospital Association (AHA). But he
cannot decrypt F1, because his role attributes do not
satisfy P1. Finally, an emergency room staff, Dorothy
who temporarily obtains the break-glass key from
ED, can gain access to F1 due to the emergency
attribute in that key. Remarks. The separation of
PSD/PUD and data/role attributes reflects the real-
world situation. First, in the PSD, a patient usually
only gives personal access of his/her sensitive PHR
to selected users, such as family members and close
friends, rather than all the friends in the social
network. Different PSD users can be assigned
different access privileges based on their
relationships with the owner. In this way, patients can
exert fine-control over the access for each user in
their PSDs. Second, by our multidomain and multi
authority framework, each public user only needs to
contact AAs in its own PUD who collaboratively
generates a secret key for the user, which reduces the
workload per AA (since each AA handles fewer
number of attributes per key issuing). In addition, the
multi authority ABE is resilient to compromise of up
to N _ 2 AAs in a PUD, which solves the key-escrow
problem. Furthermore, in our framework user’s role
verification is much easier. Different organizations
can form their own (sub)domains and become AAs to
manage and certify different sets of attributes, which
is similar to divide and rule.
4 MAIN DESIGN ISSUES
In this section, we address several key design issues
in secure and scalable sharing of PHRs in cloud
computing, under the proposed framework.
4.1 Using MA-ABE in the Public Domain
For the PUDs, our framework delegates the key
management functions to multiple attribute
authorities. In order to achieve stronger privacy
guarantee for data owners, the Chase-Chow (CC)
MA-ABE scheme [21] is used, where each authority
governs a disjoint set of attributes distributive. It is

natural to associate the cipher text of a PHR
document with an owner-specified access policy for
users from PUD. However, one technical challenge is
that CC MA-ABE is essentially a KP-ABE scheme,
where the access policies are enforced in users’ secret
keys, and those key-policies do not directly translate
to document access policies from the owners’ points
of view. By our design, we show that by agreeing
upon the formats of the key-policies and the rules of
specifying which attributes are required in the cipher
text, theCC MA-ABE can actually support owner-
specified document access policies with some degree
of flexibility (such as the one in Fig. 4), i.e., it
functions similar to CP-ABE.2 In order to allow the
owners to specify an access policy for each PHR
document, we exploit the fact that the basic CC MA-
ABE works in a way similar to fuzzy-IBE, where the
threshold policies (e.g., k out of n) are supported.
Since the threshold gate has an intrinsic symmetry
from both the encryptor and the user’s point of views,
we can predefine the formats of the allowed
document policies as well as those of the key-
policies, so that an owner can enforce a file access
policy through choosing which set of attributes to be
included in the cipher text.
4.1.1 Basic Usage of MA-ABE
Setup. In particular, the AAs first generate theMKs
andPK using setup as in CC MA-ABE. The kth AA
defines a disjoint set of role attributes UUk, which
are relatively static properties of the public users.
These attributes are classified by their types, such as
profession and license status, medical specialty, and
affiliation where each type has multiple possible
values. Basically, each monitors a disjoint subset
of attribute types. For example, in the healthcare
domain, the AMA may issue medical professional
licenses like ―physician,‖ ―M.D.,‖ ―nurse,‖ ―entry-
level license,‖ etc., the ABMS could certify
specialties like ―internal medicine,‖ ―surgery,‖ etc;
and AHA may define user affiliations such as
―hospital A‖ and ―pharmacy D.‖ In order to represent
the ―do not care‖ option for the owners, we add one
wildcard attribute ―_‖ in each type of the attributes.
Document policy generation and encryption. In the
basic usage, we consider a special class of access
policy—conjunctive normal form (CNF), P :¼ ððA1
¼ a1;1Þ _ _ _ _ _ ðA1 ¼ a1;d1ÞÞ ^ _ _ _ ^ ððAm ¼
am;1Þ _ _ _ _ _ ðAm ¼ am;dmÞÞ, where ai;j could
be ―*,‖ and m is the total number of attribute types.
For such a file access policy, an owner encrypts the
file as follows (all the attributes in this section are
role attributes):
Definition 1 (Basic Encryption Rule for PUD).
Let P be in CNF form, then P is required to contain at
least one attribute from each type, and the encryptor
associates the cipher text with all the attributes on the
leaf of the access tree corresponding to P.
2. Recently Lewko and Waters proposed a
multiauthority CP-ABEamong different AAs, i.e., P
:¼ P1 ^ _ _ _ ^ PN, where Pk could correspond to
arbitrary monotonic access structure. To be able to
implement the CNF document policy, each AA need
to follow the rule of key distribution:
Definition 2 (Basic key policy generation rule for
PUD). Let P be in the above form. For the secret key
of user u,AAu k should contain at least one attribute
from every type of attributes governed by AAk, and
always include the wildcard associated with each

type. In addition, the key policy Pk of u issued by
AAk is ð1 out of nk1Þ ^ _ _ _ ^ ð1 out of nkt Þ,
where nk1 . . . nkt are the indices of attribute types
governed by AAk. In the above, AAu k is the set of
role attributes u obtains from AAk. After key
distribution, the AAs can remain offline for most of
the time. A detailed key distribution example is given
in Table 2. The following two properties ensure that
the set of users that can decrypt a file with an access
policy P is equivalent to the set of users with key
access structures such that the cipher text’s attribute
set (P’s leaf nodes) will satisfy.
Definition 3 (Correctness). Given a cipher text and
its corresponding file access policy P and its leaf
node set LðPÞ ¼ AAC, a user access tree T and its
leaf node set LðT Þ ¼ AAu, PðLðT ÞÞ ¼ 1 ) T
ðLðPÞÞ ¼ 1. That is, whenever the attributes in user
secret key satisfy the file access policy, the attributes
in the access policy should satisfy the access
structure in user secret key.
Definition 4 (Completeness). Conversely, T ðLðPÞÞ
¼ 1 ) PðLðT ÞÞ ¼ 1.
Theorem 1. Following the above proposed key
generation and encryption rules, the CNF file access
policy achieves both correctness and completeness.
Proof. In the following, subscript i of an attribute set
denotes the subset of attributes belonging to the ith
type.
. correctness () ). If PðLðT ÞÞ ¼ 1 (i.e., LðT Þ
satisfies P), 8i ¼ 1; . . .;m; 9a 2 AAC i LiðT Þ.
Since the ith policy term in P (corresponding to user
access tree T ) is ―1 out of ni,‖ this implies T ðLðPÞÞ
¼ 1.
. Completeness (( ): it is easy to see the above is
reversible, due to the symmetry of set intersection.
The above theorem essentially states, the CC MA-
ABE can be used in a fashion like CP-ABE when the
document access policy is CNF. In practice, the
above rules need to be agreed and followed by each
owner and AA. It is easy to generalize the above
conclusions to conjunctive forms with each term
being a threshold logic formula, which will not be
elaborated here.
4.1.2 Achieving More Expressive File Access
Policies
By enhancing the key-policy generation rule, we can
enable more expressive encryptor’s access policies.
We exploit an observation that in practice, a user’s
attributes/roles belonging to different types assigned
by the same AA are often correlated with respect to a
primary attribute type. In the following, an attribute
tuple refers to the set of attribute values governed by
one AA (each of a different type) that are correlated
with each other.
Definition 5 (Enhanced Key-Policy Generation
Rule). In addition to the basic key-policy generation
rule, the attribute tuples assigned by the same AA for
different users do not intersect with each other, as
long as their primary attribute types are distinct.
Definition 6 (Enhanced Encryption Rule). In
addition to the basic encryption rule, as long as there
are multiple attributes of the same primary type,
corresponding nonintersected attribute tuples are
included in the cipher text’s attribute set.
This primary-type based attribute association is
illustrated in Fig. 3. Note that there is a ―horizontal
association‖ between two attributes belonging to

different types assigned to each user. For example, in
the first AA (AMA) in Table 2, ―license status‖ is
associated with ―profession,‖ and ―profession‖ is a
primary type. That means, a physician’s possible set
of license status do not intersect with that of anurse’s,
or a pharmacist’s. An ―M.D.‖ license is always
associated with ―physician,‖ while ―elderly’s nursing
licence‖ is always associated with ―nurse.‖ Thus, if
the second level key policy within the AMA is ―1 out
of n1 ^ 1 out of n2,‖ a physician would receive a key
like ―(physician OR *) AND (M.D. OR *)‖ (recall
the assumption that each user can only hold at most
one role attribute in each type), nurse’s will be like
―(nurse OR *) AND (elderly’s nursing licence OR
*).‖ Meanwhile, the encryptor can be made aware of
this correlation, so she may include the attribute set:
{physician, M.D., nurse, elderly’s nursing licence}
during encryption. Due to the attribute correlation,
the set of users that can have access to this file can
only possess one out of two sets of possible roles,
which means the following
policy is enforced: ―(physician AND M.D.) OR
(nurse ANDelderly’s nursing licence).‖ The direct
consequence is it enables a disjunctive normal form
(DNF) encryptor access policy to appear at the
second level. If the encryptor wants to enforce such a
DNF policy under an AA, she can simply include all
the attributes in that policy in the cipher text.
Furthermore, if one wants to encrypt with wildcard
attributes in the policy, say: ―(physician AND M.D.)
OR (nurseANDany nursing license)‖ the same idea
can be used, i.e., we can simply correlate each
―profession‖ attribute with its proprietary ―_‖
attribute. So we will have ―_nursing license,
_physician license,‖ etc., in the users’ keys. The
above discussion is summarized in Fig. 4 by an
example encryptor’s policy. If there are multiple
PUDs, then P ¼ [PUDjfPPUDjg, and multiple sets of
cipher text components needs to
Fig. 3. Illustration of the enhanced key-policy generation
rule. Solid horizontal lines represent possible attribute
associations for two users.
be included. Since in reality, the number of PUDs is
usually small, this method is more efficient and
secure than a straightforward application of CP-ABE
in which each organization acts as an authority that
governs all types of attributes [1], and the length of
cipher text grows linearly with the number of
organizations. For efficiency, each file is encrypted
with a randomly generated file encryption key (FEK),
which is then encrypted by ABE.
Fig. 4. An example policy realizable under our
framework using MAABE, following the enhanced key
generation and encryption rules.

4.1.3 Summary
In this above, we present a method to enforce
owner’s access policy during encryption, which
utilizes the MAABE scheme in a way like CP-ABE.
The essential idea is to define a set of key-generation
rules and encryption rules. There are two layers in the
encryptor’s access policy, the first one is across
different attribute authorities while the second is
across different attributes governed by the same AA.
For the first layer, conjunctive policy is enabled; for
the second, either k-out-of-n or DNF policy are
supported. We exploit the correlations among
attribute types under an AA to enable the extended
second-level DNF policy.
Next, we summarize the formats of user secret key
and cipher text in our framework. A user u in an
owner’s PSD has the following keys: SKPSD u ¼
hfDigi2AAu PSD i, where Di follows the
construction of the YWRL ABE scheme (shown in
supplementary material, available online), and AAu
PSD is the attribute set in the key policy for u. For a
user u in a PUD, SKPUD u ¼ hDu;
fDk;igk2f1;...;Ng;i2AAu k i, where Du and Dk;i are
defined according to the MA-ABE scheme (also in
supplementary material, available online), and AAu
k include attributes in the key policy issued by AAk.
The cipher text of file F is: EðFÞ ¼ hEABEðFEKÞ;
EFEKðFÞi, where EFEKðFÞ is a symmetric key
encryption of F, andEABEðFEKÞ ¼ hEPSDðFEKÞ;
EPUDðFEKÞi, where each of the cipher texts are
encrypted using the YWRL ABE scheme and MA-
ABE scheme, respectively.
4.2 Enhancing MA-ABE for User Revocation
The original CC MA-ABE scheme does not enable
efficient and on-demand user revocation. To achieve
this for MAABE, we combine ideas from YWRL’s
revocable KP-ABE [9], [15] (its details are shown in
supplementary material, available online), and
propose an enhanced MA-ABE scheme. In particular,
an authority can revoke a user or user’s attributes
immediately by re encrypting the cipher texts and
updating users’ secret keys, while a major part
ofthese operations can be delegated to the server
which enhances efficiency. The idea to revoke one
attribute of a user in MA-ABE is as follows: The AA
who governs this attribute actively updates that
attribute for all the affected unrevoked users. To this
end, the following updates should be carried out:
1) the public/master key components for the affected
attribute; (2) the secret key component corresponding
to that attribute of each unrevoked user; 3) Also, the
server shall update all the cipher texts containing that
attribute. In order to reduce the potential
computational burden for the AAs, we adopt proxy
encryption to delegate operations 2 and 3 to the
server, and use lazy-revocation to reduce the
overhead. In particular, each data attribute i is
associated with a version number veri. Upon each
revocation event, if I is an affected attribute, the AA
submits a rekey rki$i0 ¼ t0 i=ti to the server, who
then re encrypts the affected cipher texts and
increases their version numbers. The unrevoked
users’ secret key components are updated via a
similar operationusing the rekey. To delegate secret
key updates to the server, a dummy attribute needs to
be additionally defined by each of N _ 1 AAs, which

are always ANDed with each user’s key-policy to
prevent the server from grasping the secret keys. This
also maintains the resistance against up to N _ 2 AA
collusion of MA-ABE (as will be shown by our
security proof). Using lazy-revocation, the affected
cipher texts and user secret keys are only updated
when an affected unrevoked user logs into the system
next time. By the form of the rekey, all the updates
can be aggregated from the last login to the most
current one. To revoke a user in MA-ABE, one needs
to find out a minimal subset of attributes (_) such that
without it the user’s secret key’s access structure
(AAu) will never be satisfied. Because our MA-ABE
scheme requires conjunctive access policy across the
AAs, it suffices to find a minimal subset by each
AAk (_k _ AAu k), without which AAu k will not be
satisfied, and then compute the minimal set (_kmin )
out of all _k. The AAkmin will initiate the revocation
operation. The enhanced CC MA-ABE scheme with
immediate revocation capabilities is formally
described in Fig. 5. It has nine algorithms, where
Minimal Set, Re Key Gen, ReEnc, and Key Update
are related to user revocation, and PolicyUpdate is for
handling dynamic policy changes. A version number
is used to record and differentiate the system states
(PK, MK, SK, CT) after each revocation operation.
Since this scheme combines [9] and [21], the
differences with respect to each of them are
highlighted.
Fig. 5. The enhanced MA-ABE scheme with on-demand
revocation capabilities

TABLE 3
Comparison of Security
TABLE 4
Notations for Efficiency Comparison
4.3 Enforce Write Access Control
If there is no restrictions on write access, anyone may
write to someone’s PHR using only public keys,
which is undesirable. By granting write access, we
mean a data contributor should obtain proper
authorization from the organization she is in (and/or
from the targeting owner), which shall be able to be
verified by the server who grants/rejects write access.
A naive way is to let each contributor obtain a
signature from her organization every time she
intends to write. Yet this requires the organizations
be always online. The observation is that, it is
desirable and practical to authorize according to time
periods whose granularity can be adjusted. For
example, a doctor should be permitted to write only
during her office hours; on the other hand, the doctor
must not be able to write to patients that are not
treated by her. Therefore, we combine signatures
with the hash chain technique to achieve our goals.
Suppose the time granularity is set to _t, and the time
is divided into periods of _t. For each working cycle
(e.g., a day), an organization generates a hash chain
[30], [31]: H ¼ fh0; h1; . . . ; hng, where Hðhi_1Þ ¼
hi, 1 _ i _ n. At time 0, the organization broadcasts a
signature of the chain end hn (_orgðhnÞ) to all users
in its domain, where _ð_Þ stands for an unforgeable
signature scheme. After that it multicasts hn_i to the
set of authorized contributors at each time period i.
Note that, the above method enables timely
revocation of write access, i.e., the authority simply
stops issuing hashes for a contributor at the time of
revocation. In addition, an owner could distribute a
time-related signature: _ownerðts; ttÞ to the entities
that requests write access (which can be delegated to
the organization), where ts is the start time of the
granted time window, and tt is the end of the time
window. For example, to enable a billing clerk to add
billing information to Alice’s PHR, Alice can specify
―8 am to 5 pm‖ as the granted time window at the
beginning of a clinical visit. Note that, for
contributors in the PSD of the owner, they only need
to obtain signatures from the owner herself.
Generally, during time period j, an authorized
contributor w submits a ―ticket‖ to the server after
being authenticated to it:

_ Epkserver ð_ownerðtskttÞk_orgðhnÞkhn_jkrÞ;
where _ Epkserver is the public key encryption using
the server’s public key, and r is a nonce to prevent
replay attack. The server verifies if the signatures are
correct using both org’s and owner’s public keys, and
whether Hjðhn_jÞ ¼ hn, where HjðÞ means hash j
times. Only if both holds, the contributor is granted
write access and the server accepts the contents
uploaded subsequently.
4.4 Handle Dynamic Policy Changes
Our scheme should support the dynamic add/modify/
delete of part of the document access policies or data
attributes by the owner. For example, if a patient does
not want doctors to view her PHR after she finishes a
visit to a hospital, she can simply delete the cipher
text components corresponding to attribute ―doctor‖
in her PHR files. Adding and modification of
attributes/access policies can be done by proxy re
encryption techniques [22]; however, they are
expensive. To make the computation more efficient,
each owner could store the random number s used in
encrypting the FEK3 of each document on her own
computer, and construct new cipher text components
corresponding to added/changed attributes based on
s. The Policy Update algorithm is shown in Fig. 5. To
reduce the storage cost, the owner can merely keep a
random seed s0 and generate the s for each encrypted
file from s0, such as using a pseudorandom
generator. Thus, the main computational overhead to
modify/add one attribute in the cipher text is just one
modular exponentiation operation.
LI ET AL.: SCALABLE AND SECURE SHARING
OF PERSONAL HEALTH RECORDS IN CLOUD
COMPUTING USING ATTRIBUTE-BASED... 139
Fig. 5. The enhanced MA-ABE scheme with on-
demand revocation capabilities.
3. The details of the encryption algorithms are shown
in supplementary material, available online.
4.5 Deal with Break-Glass Access
For certain parts of the PHR data, medical staffs need
to have temporary access when an emergency
happens to a patient, who may become unconscious
and is unable to change her access policies
beforehand. The medical staffs will need some
temporary authorization (e.g., emergency key) to
decrypt those data. Under our framework, this can be
naturally achieved by letting each patient delegate her
emergency key to an emergency department.
Specifically, in the beginning, each owner defines an
―emergency‖ attribute and builds it into the PSD part
of the cipher text of each PHR document that she
allows break-glass access. She then generates an
emergency key skEM using the singlenode key-
policy ―emergency,‖ and delegates it to the ED who
keeps it in a database of patient directory. Upon
emergency, a medical staff authenticates herself to
the ED, requests and obtains the corresponding
patient’s skEM, and then decrypts the PHR
documents using skEM. After the patient recovers
from the emergency, she can revoke the break-glass
access by computing a rekey: rkEM, submit it to the
ED and the server to update her skEM and CT to
their newest versions, respectively. Remarks. We
note that, although using ABE and MA-ABE
enhances the system scalability, there are some
limitations in the practicality of using them in
building PHR systems. For example, in workflow-
based access control scenarios, the data access right

could be given based on users’ identities rather than
their attributes, while ABE does not handle that
efficiently. In those scenarios one may consider the
use of attribute-based broadcast encryption (ABBE)
[32]. In addition, the impressibility of our encrypt
or’s access policy is somewhat limited by that of
MA-ABE’s, since it only supports conjunctive policy
across multiple AAs. In practice, the credentials from
different organizations may be considered equally
effective, in that case distributed ABE schemes [33]
will be needed. We designate those issues as future
works.
5 SECURITY ANALYSES
In this section, we analyze the security of the
proposed PHR sharing solution. First we show it
achieves data confidentiality (i.e., preventing
unauthorized read accesses), by proving the enhanced
MA-ABE scheme (with efficient revocation) to be
secure under the attribute-based selective set model
[21], [34]. We have the following main theorem.
Theorem 2. The enhanced MA-ABE scheme
guarantees data confidentiality of the PHR data
against unauthorized users and the curious cloud
service provider, while maintaining the collusion
resistance against users and up to N _ 2 AAs.
In addition, our framework achieves forward secrecy,
and security of write access control. For detailed
security analysis and proofs, please refer to the online
supplementary material, available online, of this
paper. We also compare the security of our scheme
with several existing works, in terms of
confidentiality guarantee, access control granularity,
and supported revocation method, etc.
We choose four representative state-of-the-art
schemes to
compare with:
1. the VFJPS scheme [28] based on access control list
(ACL);
2. the BCHL scheme based on HIBE [8] where each
owner acts as a key distribution center;
3. the HN revocable CP-ABE scheme [23], where we
adapt it by assuming using one PUD with a single
authority and multiple PSDs to fit our setting;
4.the NGS scheme in [16] which is a privacy
preserving
EHR system that adopts attribute-based
broadcast encryption to achieve data access control;
5. The RNS scheme in [25] that enhances the Lewko-
Waters MA-ABE with revocation capability for data
access control in the cloud.
The results are shown in Table 3. It can be seen that,
our scheme achieves high privacy guarantee and on-
demand revocation. The conjunctive policy
restriction only applies for PUD, while in PSD a
user’s access structure can still be arbitrary
monotonic formula. In comparison with the RNS
scheme, in RNS the AAs are independent with each
other, while in our scheme the AAs issue user secret
keys collectively and interactively. Also, the RNS
scheme supports arbitrary monotonic Boolean
formula as file access policy. However, our user
revocation method is more efficient in terms of
communication overhead. In RNS, upon each
revocation event, the data owner needs to recompute
and send new cipher text components corresponding
to revoked attributes to all the remaining users. In our
scheme, such interaction is not needed. In addition,

our proposed framework specifically addresses the
access requirements in cloud based health record
management systems by logically dividing the
system into PUD and PSDs, which considers both
personal and professional PHR users. Our revocation
methods for ABE in both types of domains are
consistent. The RNS scheme only applies to the
PUD.
6 SCALABILITY AND EFFICIENCY
6.1 Storage and Communication Costs
First, we evaluate the scalability and efficiency of our
solution in terms of storage, communication, and
computation costs. We compare with previous
schemes in terms of cipher text size, user secret key
size, public key/information size, and revocation
(rekeying) message size. Our analysis is based on the
worst case where each user may potentially access
part of every owners’ data. Table 4 is a list of
notations, where in our scheme: jUj ¼ jUDj þ jURj,
tc ¼ jAAC PSDj þ jAAC PUDj (includes one
emergency attribute), and tu ¼ jAAu PSDj þ jAAu
PUDj (a user could be both in a PSD and PUD). Note
that, since the HN, NGS, and RNS schemes do not
separate PSD and PUD, their jUj ¼ jURj, tc ¼ jAAC
PUDj, and tu ¼ jAAu PUDj. However, they only
apply to PHR access in the PUD. In addition, S0P _
Oðt2c Þ in the RNS scheme, while SP _ OðtclogtcÞ
for the rest. The results are given in Table 5. The
cipher text size only accounts for the encryption of
FEK. In our scheme, for simplicity we assume there
is only one PUD, thus the cipher text includes m
additional wildcard attributes and up to N _ 1 dummy
attributes. Our scheme requires a secret key size that
is linear with, the number of attributes of each user,
while in the VFJPS and BCHL schemes this is linear
with No, since a user needs to obtain at least one key
from each owner whose PHR file the user wants to
access. For public key size, we count the size of the
effective information that each user needs to obtain.
The VFJPS scheme requires each owner to publish a
directed acyclic graph representing her ACL along
with key assignments, which essentially amounts to
per owner. This puts a large burden either in
communication or storage cost on the system. For
rekeying, we consider revocation of one user by an
owner in VFJPS and BCHL. In VFJPS, revoking one
user from a file may need over encryption and issuing
of new public tokens for all the rest of users in the
worst case. The NGS scheme achieves direct user
revocation using ABBE, which eliminates the need of
rekeying and re encryption; however, attribute
revocation is not achieved; and for the revocable
ABBE in [32], either the cipher text size is linear
with the number of revoked users, or the public key is
linear with the total number of users in the system.4
For the RNS scheme, the main drawback is the large
size of revocation messages to be transmitted to non
revoked users. In our scheme, revocation of one user
u requires revoking a minimum set of data attributes
that makes her access structure unsatisfiable. From
Table 5, it can be seen that our scheme has much
smaller secret key size compared with VFJPS and
BCHL, smaller rekeying message size than VFJPS,
HN, and RNS, the size of cipher text is smaller than
NGS while being comparable with HN and RNS. The
public key size is smaller than VFJPS and BCHL,
and is comparable with that of RNS; while it seems
larger than those of HN and NGS, note that we can

use the large universe constructions [21] to
dramatically reduce the public key size. Overall,
compared with non-ABE schemes, our scheme
achieves higher scalability in key management.
Compared with existing revocable ABE schemes, the
main advantage of our solution is small rekeying
message sizes. To revoke a user, the maximum
rekeying message size is linear with the number of
attributes in that user’s secret key. These indicate our
scheme is more scalable than existing works. To
further show the storage and communication costs,
we provide a numerical analysis using typical
parameter settings in the supplementary material,
available online.
6.2 Computation Costs
Next, we evaluate the computational cost of our
scheme through combined implementation and
simulation. We provide the first implementation of
the GPSW KP-ABE scheme [35] (to the best of our
knowledge), and also integrated the ABE algorithms
into a prototype PHR system, Indivo [27], [36]. The
GPSW KP-ABE scheme is tested on a PC with 3.4
GHz processor, using the pairingbased cryptography
(PBC) library [37]. The public parameters are chosen
to provide 80 bits security level, and we use a
pairing-friendly type-A 160-bit elliptic curve group
[37]. This parameter setting has also been adopted in
other related works in ABE [19], [38]. We then use
the ABE algorithms to encrypt randomly generated
XML-formatted files (since real PHR files are
difficult to obtain), and implement the user-interfaces
for data input and output. Due to space limitations,
the details of prototype implementation are reported
in [36].
In the supplementary material, available online, (Fig.
2), we present benchmarks of cryptographic
operations and detailed timing results for the two
ABE algorithms used by our framework. It is shown
that, the decryption operation in our enhanced MA-
ABE scheme is quite fast, because it involves only
jAAC PUDj þ 1 pairing operations (in contrast, the
RNS scheme involves 2jAAC PUDj þ 1 pairing
operations). The time costs of key generation,
encryption, and decryption processes are all linear
with the number of attributes. For 50 attributes, they
all take less than 0.5 s. From the system aspect, each
data owner (patient) uses the YWRL ABE scheme
for setup, key generation and revocation, uses both
YWRL and enhanced MA-ABE for encryption. Each
PSD user adopts the YWRL scheme for decryption,
while each PUD user adopts the enhanced MA-ABE
scheme for decryption. Each AA uses enhanced MA-
ABE for setup, key generation and revocation. Next,
we provide estimations of computation times of each
party in the system in Table 6. The values are
calculated from the example parameters and
benchmark results, where exponentiation times Exp1
¼ 6:4 ms, ExpT ¼ 0:6 ms, pairing time TP ¼ 2:5 ms.
Finally, we simulate the server’s computation cost
spent in user revocation to evaluate the system
performance of user revocation. Especially, the lazy-
revocation method greatly reduces the cost of
revocation, because it aggregates multiple cipher
text/key update operations, which amortizes the
computations over time. The details of the
experimental/simulation evaluation results are
presented in the supplementary material, available
online.

7 CONCLUSION
In this paper, we have proposed a novel framework
of secure sharing of personal health records in cloud
computing. Considering partially trustworthy cloud
servers, we argue that to fully realize the patient-
centric concept, patients shall have complete control
of their own privacy through encrypting their PHR
files to allow fine-grained access. The framework
addresses the unique challenges brought by multiple
PHR owners and users, in that we greatly reduce the
complexity of key management while enhance the
privacy guarantees compared with previous works.
We utilize ABE to encrypt the PHR data, so that
patients can allow access not only by personal users,
but also various users from public domains with
different professional roles, qualifications, and
affiliations. Furthermore, we enhance an existing
MA-ABE scheme to handle efficient and on-demand
user revocation, and prove its security. Through
implementation and simulation, we show that our
solution is both scalable and efficient.
REFERENCES
[1] M. Li, S. Yu, K. Ren, and W. Lou, ―Securing
Personal Health Records in Cloud Computing:
Patient-Centric and Fine-Grained Data Access
Control in Multi-Owner Settings,‖ Proc. Sixth Int’l
ICST Conf. Security and Privacy in Comm.
Networks (SecureComm ’10), pp. 89-106, Sept.
2010.
[2] H. Lo¨ hr, A.-R. Sadeghi, and M. Winandy,
―Securing the E-Health Cloud,‖ Proc. First ACM
Int’l Health Informatics Symp. (IHI ’10), pp. 220-
229, 2010.
[3] M. Li, S. Yu, N. Cao, and W. Lou, ―Authorized
Private Keyword Search over Encrypted Personal
Health Records in Cloud Computing,‖ Proc. 31st Int’l
Conf. Distributed Computing Systems (ICDCS ’11),
June 2011.
[4] ―The Health Insurance Portability and
Accountability Act,‖ http://www.cms .hhs.gov/ HIPA
AGe nInfo/01_Overview.asp, 2012.
[5] ―Google, Microsoft Say Hipaa Stimulus Rule
Doesn’t Apply to Them,‖ http://www.ihealth beat.
org/Articles/2009/4/8/, 2012.
[6] ―At Risk of Exposure - in the Push for Electronic
Medical Records, Concern Is Growing About How
Well Privacy Can Be Safeguarded,‖ http:// articles
.latimes.com/2006/jun/26/health/he-privacy 26, 2006.
[7] K.D. Mandl, P. Szolovits, and I.S. Kohane,
―Public Standards andPatients’ Control: How to Keep
Electronic Medical Records Accessible but Private,‖
BMJ, vol. 322, no. 7281, pp. 283-287.

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