Design flaws in a secure medical data exchange protocol based on cloud environments

Abstract

With the growing popularity of network technologies, cloud-based health care applications are becoming an essential part of telecare medical information systems have been widely studied in recent years. To protect patient privacy and restrict the access of precious services for legal privileged participants only, many secure medical data exchange protocols have been widely utilized for various service-oriented medical systems. In 2014, Chen et al. proposed a secure medical data exchange protocol based on cloud environments. They claimed that their protocol achieves better security as compared to those for other existing medical-oriented systems. However, in this paper, we found that Chen et al.’s data exchange protocol has two functional weaknesses such as (1) it fails to provide real-time monitoring service, (2) it has two design flaws in doctor treatment phase and is not easily reparable.