Efficient and Privacy-preserving Fog-assisted Health Data Sharing Scheme

Pervasive data collected from e-healthcare devices possess significant medical value through data sharing with professional healthcare service providers. However, health data sharing poses several security issues, such as access control and privacy leakage, as well as faces critical challenges to obtain efficient data analysis and services. In this article, we propose an efficient and privacy-preserving fog-assisted health data sharing (PFHDS) scheme for e-healthcare systems. Specifically, we integrate the fog node to classify the shared data into different categories according to disease risks for efficient health data analysis. Meanwhile, we design an enhanced attribute-based encryption method through combination of a personal access policy on patients and a professional access policy on the fog node for effective medical service provision. Furthermore, we achieve significant encryption consumption reduction for patients by offloading a portion of the computation and storage burden from patients to the fog node. Security discussions show that PFHDS realizes data confidentiality and fine-grained access control with collusion resistance. Performance evaluations demonstrate cost-efficient encryption computation, storage and energy consumption.