Efficient attribute-based secure data sharing with hidden policies and traceability in mobile health networks

Mobile health (also written as mHealth) provisions the practice of public health supported by mobile devices. mHealth systems let patients and healthcare providers collect and share sensitive information, such as electronic and personal health records (EHRs) at any time, allowing more rapid convergence to optimal treatment. Key to achieving this is securely sharing data by providing enhanced access control and reliability. Typically, such sharing follows policies that depend on patient and physician preferences defined by a set of attributes. In mHealth systems, not only the data but also the policies for sharing it may be sensitive since they directly contain sensitive information which can reveal the underlying data protected by the policy. Also, since the policies usually incur linearly increasing communication costs, mHealth is inapplicable to resource-constrained environments. Lastly, access privileges may be publicly known to users, so a malicious user could illegally share his access privileges without the risk of being traced. In this paper, we propose an efficient attribute-based secure data sharing scheme in mHealth. The proposed scheme guarantees a hidden policy, constant-sized ciphertexts, and traces, with security analyses. The computation cost to the user is reduced by delegating approximately 50% of the decryption operations to the more powerful storage systems.