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Towards privacy protection and malicious behavior traceability in smart health

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Abstract

As a more ubiquitous concept, smart health (s-health) is the context-aware complement of mobile health within smart cities, and it has made an increasing number of people turn to cloud-based services. In a practical s-health system, security and privacy issues are of great importance and have to be addressed. In this paper, we propose a secure s-health system which realizes fine-grained access control on s-health cloud data and hence ensures users’ privacy protection. The key technique is a promising cryptographic primitive called ciphertext-policy attribute-based encryption. In order to trace malicious behaviors in the proposed s-health system, two kinds of key abuse problems are considered: malicious key sharing among colluding users and key escrow problem of the semi-trusted authority. In the proposed s-health system, any malicious behavior of a user including illegal key sharing can be traced. For the semi-trusted authority, it can be accountable for its misbehavior including illegal key re-distribution. Particularly, the proposed system supports large universe and attributes do not need to be pre-specified during the system initialization phase. Besides, our system is proven fully secure in the random oracle model and it allows any monotonic access policies. Theoretical analysis and experimental results indicate that the proposed s-health system is suitable for smart city environment.

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Notes

  1. The expression “weak public” is similar to the term “partial public” in [9], in which only private user traceability is realized.

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Acknowledgements

This work is supported by National Natural Science Foundation of China (No. 61402366, 61472091, 61472472, and 61272037), Natural Science Basic Research Plan in Shaanxi Province (No. 2015JQ6236, 2013JZ020), Scientific Research Program Funded by Shaanxi Provincial Education Department (No. 15JK1686), Program for New Century Excellent Talents in University (No. NCET-13-0946), Doctoral Fund of Ministry of Education of China (No. 20130203110004), and Distinguished Young Scholars Fund of Department of Education, Guangdong Province (No. Yq2013126). Yinghui Zhang is supported by New Star Team of Xi’an University of Posts and Telecommunications.

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. National Engineering Laboratory for Wireless Security, Xi’an University of Posts and Telecommunications, Xi’an, 710121, People’s Republic of China

    Yinghui Zhang & Dong Zheng

  2. State Key Laboratory of Cryptology, P.O. Box 5159, Beijing, 100878, People’s Republic of China

    Yinghui Zhang & Xiaofeng Chen

  3. Westone Cryptologic Research Center, Beijing, 100070, People’s Republic of China

    Yinghui Zhang & Dong Zheng

  4. School of Computer Science, Guangzhou University, Guangzhou, 510006, People’s Republic of China

    Jin Li

  5. State Key Laboratory of Integrated Service Networks (ISN), Xidian University, Xi’an, 710071, People’s Republic of China

    Xiaofeng Chen & Hui Li

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  1. Yinghui Zhang
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  2. Jin Li
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  3. Dong Zheng
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Correspondence to Yinghui Zhang or Dong Zheng.

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A preliminary version of this paper appears in ACISP 2016.

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Cite this article

Zhang, Y., Li, J., Zheng, D. et al. Towards privacy protection and malicious behavior traceability in smart health. Pers Ubiquit Comput 21, 815–830 (2017). https://doi.org/10.1007/s00779-017-1047-8

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  • DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s00779-017-1047-8

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