A Secure Data Transfer Approach With an Efficient Key Management Over Cloud

Abstract

The growth in the number of cloud users who transfer their health data have enhanced the importance of cloud technology's services and capabilities. However, transferring patient health data to the cloud leaves researchers with several concerns and obstacles in privacy, storage, access, key-formation, and management. The paper presents an efficient methodology for storing and accessing health information to and from the cloud. The symmetric key cryptography with the MD5 hash function is employed to enhance the framework's efficiency. The proposed method also provides secure data sharing and removes the burden of an exhaustive re-encryption computation. In the paper, two different keys are computed: one key for each legitimate user among a group and another key for the crypto-system, which is responsible to do all computations over the data. The method provides security against internal threats since only a single share of the key can be accessed. The efficiency of the model is measured by measuring the execution time for key formation, encryption, and decryption processes.