Fog-Based Secure Framework for Personal Health Records Systems

The rapid development of personal health records (PHR) systems enables an individual to collect, create, store and share his PHR to authorized entities. Health care systems within the smart city environment require a patient to share his PRH data with a multitude of institutions' repositories located in the cloud. The cloud computing paradigm cannot meet such a massive transformative healthcare systems due to drawbacks including network latency, scalability and bandwidth. Fog computing relieves the load of conventional cloud computing by availing intermediate fog nodes between the end users and the remote servers. Assuming a massive demand of PHR data within a ubiquitous smart city, we propose a secure and fog assisted framework for PHR systems to address security, access control and privacy concerns. Built under a fog-based architecture, the proposed framework makes use of efficient key exchange protocol coupled with ciphertext attribute based encryption (CP-ABE) to guarantee confidentiality and fine-grained access control within the system respectively. We also make use of digital signature combined with CP-ABE to ensure the system authentication and users privacy. We provide the analysis of the proposed framework in terms of security and performance.