FSSR: Fine-Grained EHRs Sharing via Similarity-Based Recommendation in Cloud-Assisted eHealthcare System

Abstract

With the evolving of ehealthcare industry, electronic health records (EHRs), as one of the digital health records stored and managed by patients, have been regarded to provide more benefits. With the EHRs, patients can conveniently share health records with doctors and build up a complete picture of their health. However, due to the sensitivity of EHRs, how to guarantee the security and privacy of EHRs becomes one of the most important issues concerned by patients. To tackle these privacy challenges such as how to make a fine-grained access control on the shared EHRs, how to keep the confidentiality of EHRs stored in cloud, how to audit EHRs and how to find the suitable doctors for patients, in this paper, we propose a fine-grained EHRs sharing scheme via similarity-based recommendation accelerated by Locality Sensitive Hashing (LSH) in cloud-assisted ehealthcare system, called FSSR. Specifically, our proposed scheme allows patients to securely share their EHRs with some suitable doctors under fine-grained privacy access control. Detailed security analysis confirms its security prosperities. In addition, extensive simulations by developing a prototype of FSSR are also conducted, and the performance evaluations demonstrate the FSSR's effectiveness in terms of computational cost, storage and communication cost while minimizing the privacy disclosure.