Investigating Novel Approaches to Privacy-Aware Healthcare Data Sharing in Cloud Environment

In the contemporary landscape of healthcare data management, the proliferation of cloud computing has revolutionized the storage, accessibility, and analysis of vast volumes of sensitive patient information. The transition to cloud-based infrastructures offers unparalleled scalability, cost-efficiency, and flexibility, thereby enticing healthcare organizations to leverage cloud technologies for data storage and processing. However, alongside the advantages come formidable challenges, notably concerning data privacy and security. This paper presents a novel Privacy-Aware Data Sharing Framework tailored for healthcare applications within cloud environments. In response to growing concerns regarding data privacy and security, the proposed framework integrates a newly developed algorithm, termed PrivacyGuard, to ensure robust privacy protection while facilitating efficient data sharing. PrivacyGuard combines Attribute-Based Encryption (ABE) with Data Fragmentation techniques to enhance privacy preservation. The framework employs ABE to encrypt healthcare data based on attribute-based access policies, enabling only authorized users with corresponding attributes to decrypt and access the data. Moreover, Data Fragmentation is utilized to break down sensitive data into smaller fragments distributed across multiple cloud servers, mitigating the risk of unauthorized access. To evaluate the effectiveness of the Privacy-Aware Data Sharing Framework, comprehensive simulation analyses are conducted, comparing its performance with several existing algorithms using appropriate simulation metrics such as throughput, latency, computational overhead and security overhead. Results demonstrate that PrivacyGuard significantly improves data privacy while maintaining satisfactory performance levels compared to traditional approaches. This research contributes to advancing privacy-preserving techniques in healthcare data sharing within cloud environments, addressing critical concerns surrounding data security and privacy compliance.