A Security Model for Preserving the Privacy of Medical Big Data in a Healthcare Cloud Using a Fog Computing Facility With Pairing-Based Cryptography

Nowadays, telemedicine is an emerging healthcare service where the healthcare professionals can diagnose, evaluate, and treat a patient using telecommunication technology. To diagnose and evaluate a patient, the healthcare professionals need to access the electronic medical record (EMR) of the patient, which might contain huge multimedia big data including X-rays, ultrasounds, CT scans, and MRI reports. For efficient access and supporting mobility for both the healthcare professionals as well as the patients, the EMR needs to be kept in big data storage in the healthcare cloud. In spite of the popularity of the healthcare cloud, it faces different security issues; for instance, data theft attacks are considered to be one of the most serious security breaches of healthcare data in the cloud. In this paper, the main focus has been given to secure healthcare private data in the cloud using a fog computing facility. To this end, a tri-party one-round authenticated key agreement protocol has been proposed based on the bilinear pairing cryptography that can generate a session key among the participants and communicate among them securely. Finally, the private healthcare data are accessed and stored securely by implementing a decoy technique.