A systematic literature review of attribute based encryption in health services

The widespread adoption of cloud technology in the healthcare industry has achieved effective outcomes in sharing health records and sensitive data. In recent years, many organizations have prioritized EHealth as their primary goal for advancement in health services. As a result, Attribute Based Encryption (ABE) has emerged as a reliable model for health information exchange across cloud settings. Eventually, it leads to provide acceptable solutions for challenging scenarios like fine-grained access control. Despite ABE significance and its breadth of applications, no systematic and comprehensive survey exists in the literature that covers every variation of ABE in healthcare, highlighting its past and present status. This paper presents a systematic and comprehensive study of ABE works concerning E-Health as the authors rigorously investigate healthcare-focused ABE frameworks and examine them based on various descriptive criteria, along with categorizing them systematically in 10 distinct domains and subdomains, ultimately offering observations and potential recommendations. The descriptive research design, significant findings along with the suggested future works will help future research in ABE to secure the existing E-Health data sharing more effectively. The present study will also facilitate researchers and practitioners to comprehend the past trends and current state of ABE architectures in secure health data-sharing scenarios, as well as the prospect of ABE deployment in most recent technological evolutions. (c) 2022 The Author(s). Published by Elsevier B.V. on behalf of King Saud University. This is an open access article under the CC BY license (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/).