An efficient implementation of next generation access control for the mobile health cloud

In today's era health informatics is a major contributor to the advancements in ubiquitous computing. Of late, the concept of mobile health (mHealth) systems has attracted considerable attention from both medical computer science communities. mHealth devices generate a significant amount of patient data on a timely basis. This data is often stored on cloud-based EHR and PHR systems to aid in timely and better quality healthcare service. However, as has been seen lately, stored personal records act as honeypots for malicious entities and the internet underground. It is thus imperative to prevent unauthorized leakage of mHealth data from cloud-based E/PHR systems. As observed from some of our preliminary research, NIST's policy machine (PM) framework suits the access control modeling requirements posed by mHealth systems. Moreover, the graph-based model adopted by this framework allows efficient policy management through advanced graph search techniques. In this paper, we leverage the policy machine model to propose a cloud-based service that achieves secure storage and fine-grained dissemination of mHealth data. The primary goal of this work is to demonstrate the applicability of the PM framework to the mHealth domain and illustrate the workflow of an algorithm to resolve access decisions in theoretically faster time than achieved by existing implementations.