摘要：The amount of digital records created on a dailybasis in the health domain are expected to keep growingsharply. Surely, a medical image contains vital informationused mainly to obtain early and accurate diagnosis andtreatment. Moreover, the adoption of an electronic medicalrecord system is the most effective method to increasecollaboration among healthcare professionals in order toimprove the quality of care and patient outcomes. Based onthese considerations, sophisticated software and platforms arerequired to successfully store and process these digital records.In spite of the importance of this model, building andmaintaining a local data center for hosting IT services wouldinevitably increase the cost of healthcare services. Fortunately,cloud computing has provided healthcare institutions withaffordable and elastic services to overcome these obstacles.Indeed, this new paradigm allows healthcare organizations totake advantage of remote computational resources offered byan external party. In this respect, healthcare practitioners canaccess cloud services to store patients’ data. These services arebilled based on the actual usage of cloud resources.Nevertheless, the adoption of cloud storage in healthcare sectorfaces enormous challenges, particularly those related tosecurity and privacy. Although there exist several solutions tosecure data, they mostly rely on traditional cryptographicschemes, such as AES, RSA and DSA. However, thesetechniques are often time-consuming, and hence, not suitablefor medical data. For this reason, the proposed mechanismutilizes Shamir’s Secret Share (SSS) scheme to address thesecurity problems in cloud storage. The choice of this approachis motivated by two main reasons. First, it does not usuallyrequire complex mathematical operations to encrypt data ascompared to the other techniques. Second, it is an efficientsolution for ensuring fault-tolerance in cloud computing. Inthis paper, we present the main concepts of our approach toproperly handle data confidentiality in cloud storage. We thenexperimentally evaluate the proposed method to prove itscorrectness. The simulation results show that the proposedsolution successfully reduces the security risks when storingmedical data on remote cloud storage.
关键词：cloud computing; medical images; storage;security; secret share scheme
