A break-glass protocol based on ciphertext-policy attribute-based encryption to access medical records in the cloud

• Published in: Annales des télécommunications 2020-04, Vol.75 (3-4), p.103-119
• Main Authors: T. de Oliveira, Marcela, Bakas, Alexandros, Frimpong, Eugene, Groot, Adrien E. D., Marquering, Henk A., Michalas, Antonis, Olabarriaga, Silvia D.
• Format: Article
• Language: English
• Subjects: Access to information; Algorithms; Circuits; Communications Engineering; Computer Communication Networks; Decision making; Electronic health records; Emergency medical care; Emergency medical services; Encryption; Engineering; Information and Communication; Information dissemination; Information Systems and Communication Service; Medical records; Networks; R & D/Technology Policy; Signal,Image and Speech Processing
• ISSN: 0003-4347; 1958-9395
• DOI: 10.1007/s12243-020-00759-2

In emergency care, fast and efficient treatment is vital. The availability of Electronic Medical Records (EMR) allows healthcare professionals to access a patient’s data promptly, which facilitates the decision-making process and saves time by not repeating medical procedures. Unfortunately, the complete EMR of a patient is often not available during an emergency situation to all treatment teams. Cloud services emerge as a promising solution to this problem by allowing ubiquitous access to information. However, EMR storage and sharing through clouds raise several concerns about security and privacy. To this end, we propose a protocol through which all treatment teams involved in the emergency care can securely decrypt relevant data from the patient’s EMR and add new information about the patient’s status. Furthermore, our protocol ensures that treatment teams will only access the patient’s EMR for the period during which the patient is under their care. Finally, we present a formal security analysis of our protocol and some initial experimental results.