Privacy Provision in Collaborative Ehealth With Attribute-Based Encryption: Survey, Challenges and Future Directions

Collaborative eHealth that enables the collection and sharing of patients' data is eliminating the location and accessibility barriers in healthcare service delivery. With advances in technology, patients' data can be collected from anywhere, at any time, stored in a central location, and shared across multiple service providers to improve the quality of healthcare service delivery. Maintaining patients' data privacy during the storage and sharing process is critical for collaborative eHealth success. The attribute-based encryption, which has shown potential in data privacy protection in the cloud, has the necessary ingredients to be used in guarding against privacy violations in collaborative eHealth. In this paper, we survey the different attribute-based encryption schemes for usage in collaborative eHealth. We discuss some challenges associated with the use of attribute-based encryption schemes in collaborative eHealth and point out some future research directions. Also, we perform a comparative analysis of the surveyed schemes in terms of security, revocation ability, and efficiency.