Privacy-Preserving Data Sharing Scheme for E-Health Systems

With the constant threat of cyber attacks and their associated risks, it is more important than ever to have a secure system for uploading, viewing, and sharing patient health data. Hospitals, doctors, nurses, and technicians all have a moral and legal obligation to protect the confidentiality of the patients trusted with their care. For this obligation to be met, there must be a method for both patients and doctors to conduct secure searches over encrypted health records. The scheme proposed in this paper allows doctors and patients to securely search over multiple encrypted files while maintaining the confidentiality and privacy of the patient’s health data. Our proposed scheme utilizes a lightweight modified k-Nearest Neighbor (kNN) algorithm that relies on simple computations rather than complex data transformations, which affords our scheme the functionality of searching over encrypted data while maintaining a low computational overhead. Our performance analysis shows that our scheme is lightweight regarding computation and communication overheads. Additionally, our security and privacy analysis further indicates that our proposed scheme efficiently achieves our security and privacy design goals.