Attribute Based Encryption of Electronic Health Records : Comparative study of existing algorithms

Sammanfattning: Cloud Computing today, is an evolving technology which features large Data Storage and ready-to-access from any device. The Healthcare Industry stores large Databases of patient’s records, considering the advantages of Cloud Computing it is looking forward to moving on from the traditional, proprietary Database Management Model into an Open Source Cloud DBMS Model. To complete this transition, it is of primary importance to provide Privacy and Security for Electronic Medical Record / Electronic Health Record. There are several kinds of research being done on how to mitigate these privacy issues using algorithms like Attribute Based Encryption and Identity-Based Encryption. In this study, we compare the performance of these two attribute based encryption methods. This thesis compares the performance of the state-of-the-art Attribute Based Encryption Schemas for Electronic Medical Record / Electronic Health Record Systems. Performance evaluation is conducted in local and cloud environments. A Literature Review has been performed to identify the existing Cloud-based Electronic Health Record Systems which uses the attribute based encryption as a mechanism to mitigate the privacy issues and realization in Cloud. Two algorithms have been selected by performing snowballing from the IEEE Research Articles. Experimentation was performed on the two algorithms in a local machine and on Amazon Web Services Cloud Platform to compare the performance. Verification of performance in each stage of the execution of the algorithms, in both local machine and Cloud environment, was done.