Privacy-preserving querying mechanism on privately encrypted personal health records

The affordability of cloud data storage has made it simpler for users to store and access data online from any location or operating system. These services may be used by users to store sensitive data, such as personal health records or financial data. Many service providers offer features such as analyzing the users’ private data to generate useful reports for medical data. Storing such sensitive data on the cloud raises many privacy concerns. While encryption can ensure data confidentiality, it introduces the challenge of analyzing the privately encrypted data while preserving the privacy of the users and the querying entity. In this paper, we address this problem by proposing a network protocol that would allow a third party, such as a health organization, to query privately encrypted data without relying on a trusted entity. The protocol we propose preserves the privacy of the users and the querying entity. The protocol relies on homomorphic, threshold cryptography, and randomization to allow for secure, distributed, and privacy-preserving queries. We evaluate the performance of our protocol and report on the results of the implementation.