A Privacy Enhanced Search Approach for Cloud-Based Medical Data Sharing

With the development of healthcare industry, healthcare informatization provides great potential for the healthcare improvement. The cloud computing platform, which is an important infrastructure for the inter(intra)-organization collaboration, provides a shared storage space to the medical data sharing. For the privacy protection of medical data, sensitive data has to be encrypted before being transmitted to the cloud, which makes it more challenging to use these data in the cloud. For strengthening the utilization of encrypted cloud data, various encrypted search technologies are widely studied. However, these existing searchable encryption schemes may not enforce users´ demands well. This paper proposes a privacy enhanced search approach for cloud-based medical data sharing. The proposed solution implements a hybrid search approach, where the search process is conducted across plaintext and ciphertext. Moreover, the enhanced access control can ensure the privacy protection of cloud data. The empirical experiments illustrate the effectiveness of our solution.