Hybrid and Secure E-Health Data Sharing Architecture in Multi-Clouds Environment

Abstract

Healthcare is among the sectors showing efforts in adopting cloud computing to its services considering the provided cost reduction and healthcare process efficiency. However, outsourcing patient’s sensitive data increases the concerns regarding security, privacy, and integrity of healthcare data. Therefore, there is a need for building a trust relationship between patients and e-health systems. In this paper, we propose a privacy-preserving framework, called Hybrid and Secure Data Sharing Architecture (HSDSA), to secure data storage in e-health systems. Our approach improves security in healthcare by maintaining the privacy and confidentiality of sensitive data and preventing threats. In fact, in the upload phase, Multi-cloud environment is used to store Rivest–Shamir–Adleman (RSA) encrypted medical records. We adopt a Shamir’s secret sharing approach for the distribution of shares to different independent cloud providers. In the retrieval phase, the reconstruction operation is based on the (t, n) strategy. To check the requester identity and to prove the hash possession, we used a zero-knowledge cryptography algorithm, namely the Schnorr algorithm. The patient has a total control over the generation and management of the decryption keys using Diffie-Hellman algorithm without relying on a trusted authority.