Achieving Secure and Efficient Data Access Control for Cloud-Integrated Body Sensor Networks

Body sensor network has emerged as one of the most promising technologies for e-healthcare, which makes remote health monitoring and treatment to patients possible. With the support of mobile cloud computing, large number of health-related data collected from various body sensor networks can be managed efficiently. However, how to keep data security and data privacy in cloud-integrated body sensor network (C-BSN) is an important and challenging issue since the patients’ health-related data are quite sensitive. In this paper, we present a novel secure access control mechanism MC-ABE (Mask-Certificate Attribute-Based Encryption) for cloud-integrated body sensor networks. A specific signature is designed to mask the plaintext, and then the masked data can be securely outsourced to cloud severs. An authorization certificate composed of the signature and related privilege items is constructed which is used to grant privileges to data receivers. To ensure security, a unique value is chosen to mask the certificate for each data receiver. Thus, the certificate is unique for each user and user revocation can be easily completed by removing the mask value. The analysis shows that proposed scheme can meet the security requirement of C-BSN, and it also has less computation cost and storage cost compared with other popular models.