A break-glass protocol based on ciphertext-policy attribute-based encryption to access medical records in the cloud

Journal article (2020)

Authors

M. Tuler de Oliveira Universiteit van Amsterdam
Alexandros Bakas Tampere University
Eugene Frimpong Tampere University
Adrien E. D. Groot Universiteit van Amsterdam
Henk Marquering Universiteit van Amsterdam
Antonis Michalas Tampere University
Sílvia Delgado Olabarriaga Universiteit van Amsterdam
Affiliation
Delft University of Technology
Access control Emergency care Break-glass access Ciphertext-policy attribute-based encryption E-health privacy Electronic medical records Secure cloud storage
More Info
expand_more

Published Date

2020

Language

English

Reuse Rights

Other than for strictly personal use, it is not permitted to download, forward or distribute the text or part of it, without the consent of the author(s) and/or copyright holder(s), unless the work is under an open content license such as Creative Commons.

Affiliation

Delft University of Technology

Abstract

In emergency care, fast and efficient treatment is vital. The availability of Electronic Medical Records (EMR) allows healthcare professionals to access a patient’s data promptly, which facilitates the decision-making process and saves time by not repeating medical procedures. Unfortunately, the complete EMR of a patient is often not available during an emergency situation to all treatment teams. Cloud services emerge as a promising solution to this problem by allowing ubiquitous access to information. However, EMR storage and sharing through clouds raise several concerns about security and privacy. To this end, we propose a protocol through which all treatment teams involved in the emergency care can securely decrypt relevant data from the patient’s EMR and add new information about the patient’s status. Furthermore, our protocol ensures that treatment teams will only access the patient’s EMR for the period during which the patient is under their care. Finally, we present a formal security analysis of our protocol and some initial experimental results.