Towards a secure patient information access control in ubiquitous healthcare systems using identity-based signcryption

While ubiquitous healthcare applications over the Internet promise increasing efficiency, accuracy, and availability of medical treatment, security has received increasing attentions as one of the critical research challenges. In this paper, we consider security issues due to increasing access sharing of patient information resources in the networked environment. We propose a novel efficient access control in order to provide various security characteristics, such as authentication, confidentiality, integrity and non-repudiation for ubiquitous systems. In our communication environment, we deploy the recently developed concepts of identity-based signcryption in which the network effectively solves the problem of single point of failure in the traditional public-key infrastructure (PKI) supported system by providing key generation and key management services without any assumption of pre-fixed trust relationship between network devices.