Proposal for a Secure Data Sharing and Processing in Cloud Applications for Healthcare Domain

Abstract

Information Technology (IT) services have become an inherent component in almost all sectors. Similarly, the health sector has been recently integrating IT to meet the growing demand for medical data exchange and storage. Currently, cloud has become a real hosting alternative for traditional on-permise software. In this model, not only do health organizations have access to a wide range of services but most importantly they are charged based on the usage of these cloud applications. However, especially in the healthcare domain, cloud computing deems challenging as to the sensitivity of health data. This work aims at improving access to medical data and securely sharing them across healthcare professionals, allowing real-time collaboration. From these perspectives, they propose a hybrid cryptosystem based on AES and Paillier to prevent the disclosure of confidential data, as well as computing encrypted data. Unlike most other solutions, the proposed framework adopts a proxy-based architecture to tackle some issues regarding privacy concerns and access control. Subsequently, this system typically guarantees that only authorized users can view or use specific resources in a computing environment. To this aim, they use eXtensible Access Control Markup Language (XACML) standard to properly design and manage access control policies. In this study, they opt for the (Abbreviated Language for Authorization) ALFA tool to easily formulate XACML policies and define complex rules. The simulation results show that the proposal offers simple and efficient mechanisms for the secure use of cloud services within the healthcare domain. Consequently, this framework is an appropriate method to support collaboration among all entities involved in medical information exchange.