Health records and the cloud computing paradigm from a privacy perspective

Abstract

With the advent of cloud computing, the realization of highly available electronic health records providing location-independent access seems to be very promising. However, cloud computing raises major security issues that need to be addressed particularly within the health care domain. The protection of the privacy of individuals often seems to be left on the sidelines. For instance, common protection against malicious insiders, i.e., non-disclosure agreements, is purely organizational. Clearly, such measures cannot prevent misuses but can at least discourage it. In this paper, we present an approach to storing highly sensitive health data in the cloud whereas the protection of patient's privacy is exclusively based on technical measures, so that users and providers of health records do not need to trust the cloud provider with privacy related issues. Our technical measures comprise anonymous communication and authentication, anonymous yet authorized transactions and pseudonymization of databases.