Construction of system friendly attribute based fully distributed access control architecture for e-healthcare

The adoption of telemedicine has improved health care quality and its reachability to remote patients. There are substantial contributions towards the implementation of secure communication of medical records such as digital images, documents, videos, etc. However, less attention is paid to efficiency, privacy-preserving communication, and access control. Moreover, existing constructions have either failed to support distributed revocation or the symmetric encryption approach, which requires ensuring encryption of arbitrary length messages. As scalability and flexibility in the delegation of keys and revocation of mobile users are very fundamental issues in attribute-based access control and its application to e-healthcare, we propose a new cryptographic concept called attribute-based fully distributed access control architecture that supports fine-grained access control, data protection, data validity, and efficient data search in the context of an electronic personal health record system. The proposed design supports the symmetric key approach to encrypt/decrypt the data. The proposed design is secure and efficient, and it also provides a fully distributed access control on the stored data at a central authority with a revocation facility. It provides access to the user, doctor, and health department according to the set of attributes/ credentials shown by them. It benefits in key delegation and revocation of the user, which will help to improve the robustness of e-healthcare systems.