Personal health record storage on privacy preserving green clouds

Abstract

With digitization there is a plethora of personal information, such as, health records and personal artifacts, that are stored on the data servers provided by the Internet companies. Such a solution is resource-intensive as the servers should be up and running. Moreover, the users no longer have complete control over their own data. We propose an alternative architecture where the data is no longer stored on Internet servers, but on set of new hardware devices called Secure Portable Tokens (SPTs) that are under the control of individual users. SPTs are cheap, portable, and secure devices that combine the computing power and tamper-resistant properties of the smart cards and the storage capacity of NAND flash memory chips. SPTs can be used to store personal data and can act as a Personal Data Server (PDS). In order to make such stored data reliable and available, we propose to have a set of SPTs storing personal data of individuals that form a cloud which we refer to as Personal Data Server Clouds. We provide protocols, based on the publish-subscribe paradigm, that demonstrate how replication and query processing are performed in the PDS clouds. We demonstrate the feasibility of our approach by developing a prototype PDS cloud that is geographically distributed and stores personal health records (PHRs). © 2013 ICST.