Access control management for e-Healthcare in cloud environment

Abstract

Data outsourcing is a major component for cloud computing that allows data owners to distribute resources to external services for users and organizations who can apply the resources. A crucial problem for owners is how to make sure their sensitive information accessed by legitimate users only using the trusted services but not authorized to read the actual information. With the increased development of cloud computing, it brings challenges for data security and access control when outsourcing users’ data and sharing sensitive data in cloud environment since it is not within the same trusted domain as data owners’. Access control policies have become an important issue in the security filed in cloud computing. Semantic web technologies represent much richer forms of relationships among users, resources and actions among different web applications such as clouding computing. However, Semantic web applications pose new requirements for security mechanisms especially in the access control models. This paper addresses existing access control methods and presents a semantic based access control model which considers semantic relations among different entities in cloud computing environment. We have enriched the research for semantic web technology with role-based access control that is able to be applied in the field of medical information system or e-Healthcare system. This work shows how the semantic web technology provides efficient solutions for the management of complex and distributed data in heterogeneous systems, and it can be used in the medical information systems as well.