Implementing health information exchange with searchable encryption

Health Information Exchange (HIE) is an infrastructure that facilitates exchange of electronic health records between healthcare organizations. Because medical records are highly sensitive data subject to various federal and local regulation, in addition to company policies, it is imperative to provide privacy and security guarantees, as well as audit trail. In this thesis, we consider the problem of providing the functionality of a HIE composed of a distributed collection of providers (sources) who contribute to a centralized repository represented by a cryptographic file system, and suggest an implementation that demonstrates its feasibility. While security-enhanced file systems have been extensively studied before, more recent research establishes a rigorous standard of formally provable security properties. However, since encryption imposes overhead and loss of functionality, we propose a novel cryptographic construction called BlindStorage that enables keyword search capability over encrypted indices. The major contribution of this work is the demonstration how an advanced encryption technique can be deployed in a context close to the requirements for a standards-based HIE. We emphasize practical aspect of our design by using Web Services-based transactions that closely follow a subset of the state-of-the-art Cross-Enterprise Document Sharing-b (XDS.b) standard in the architecture. Document Repository and Document Registry gateways are being used to interface between hospital-facing Web Services and the central BlindStorage parts of the network, so that hospital applications can use the established XDS.b exchange standard without being affected by the core BlindStorage-based implementation.

Name thesis:degree_name

M.S.

Level thesis:degree_level

Thesis

Discipline thesis:degree_discipline

Computer Science

Grantor

University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign

Year dc:date

2013

Author dc:creator

• Svecs, Igors

Contributors dc:contributor

• Gunter, Carl A.

• Cryptography
• Healthcare
• Searchable Encryption
• Health Information Exchange

Statement dc:rights

• Copyright 2013 Igors Svecs

Language dc:language

en

Handle dc:identifier

http://hdl.handle.net/2142/44212

OAI identifier oai:identifier

oai:www.ideals.illinois.edu:2142/44212