Evaluating the Viability of Ciphertext-Policy Attribute-Based Encryption on Service-Oriented Health Information Exchange Systems

Achieving interoperability in healthcare leads to several benefits that affect consumers and other stakeholders. With this, several countries have already implemented a Health Information Exchange (HIE) to enable interoperability in their areas. OpenHIE [5] is an initiative that aims to address the interoperability challenges in underserved regions, such as third-world countries. OpenHIE provides a framework for implementing an HIE which is based on the Service-Oriented Architecture (SOA). Its design has been proven to work, and other countries and organizations have shown interest in adopting its components. Currently, OpenHIE can provide the de facto standard for securing health information systems. However, several essential security features concerning the privacy of health information have yet to be implemented. Here we explore the application of Ciphertext-Policy Attribute Based Encryption (CP-ABE) on OpenHIE to realize the aforementioned security features. Results show that applying CP-ABE will not only change the implementation of the functionalities of the HIE, but it will also add an overhead to its non-functional characteristics, such as the number of transactions per second, memory, and bandwidth usage.