Efficient privacy-preserving personal health record sharing framework based on decentralized lattice-based encryption

Abstract

To ensure the confidentiality of Internet of things (IoT) cloud data while enabling fine-grained access control, attribute-based encryption (ABE) schemes have been widely adopted. Despite their advantages, existing approaches suffer from three critical shortcomings: reliance on a central authority (CA) for key distribution which may lead to a single point of failure, dependence on mathematical hard problems like discrete logarithms and bilinear pairings which leaves most of them vulnerable to quantum attacks, and insufficient attention to user privacy protection mechanisms in current lattice-based ABE designs. To address these limitations, this article proposes a privacy-preserving personal health record (PHR) sharing framework based on lattice-based multi-authority attribute-based encryption (MA-ABE). The framework enhances user privacy through an anonymous commitment protocol that conceals identities and a key generation algorithm that allows decentralized authorities to issue private keys without exposing user information. Furthermore, the design extends beyond conventional single-attribute-per-authority models, enabling each authority to manage multiple attributes. Moreover, two-way anonymity for both provers and verifiers is achieved through these user privacy protection mechanisms. The proposed scheme achieves indistinguishability under selective-attribute chosen plaintext attack (IND-sAtt-CPA) security, while maintaining acceptable computational efficiency.

Keywords

multi-authority(MA) / smart health / lattice-based encryption / privacy-preserving

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