Verifiable Keyword Search Supporting Sensitive Information Hiding for the Cloud-Based Healthcare Sharing System

With the integration of the healthcare system, Internet of Things, and cloud storage service, more and more medical institutions upload their electronic medical records (EMRs) to the cloud to reduce the local storage burden and realize data sharing among external researchers. To secure the sensitive information, EMRs usually should be encrypted before being stored on the cloud. However, the existing searchable encryption schemes that encrypt the entire EMRs can hide the sensitive information, but this results in the shared EMRs being unable to be used by researchers. In addition, if the queried and extracted EMRs are incorrect, it will lead to misdiagnosis and even endanger the patient’s life. In order to solve the aforementioned problems, in this article, we propose a verifiable keyword search scheme supporting sensitive information hiding for the cloud-based healthcare sharing system. The sensitive information is encrypted, while other contents in EMR can be shared among users in this scheme. Doctors and researchers can quickly perform search operations based on keywords to extract the EMRs they require. This time complexity is
$O(n)$
, where
$n$
is the number of attribute values in the record. But the sensitive information is hidden for the researchers. Furthermore, the correctness of EMRs can be verified when they are extracted from the cloud. This time complexity is max
$\lbrace O(n^{\prime }),O(N^{\prime })\rbrace$
, where
$n^{\prime }$
is the number of query keywords and
$N^{\prime }$
is the number of the retrieved records. We expound the security and carry out experiments to estimate the efficiency of the proposed scheme.