Privacy Protection and Intrusion Avoidance for Cloudlet-based Medical Data Sharing

With the popularity of wearable devices, along with the development of clouds and cloudlet technology, there has been increasing need to provide better medical care. The processing chain of medical data mainly includes data collection, data storage and data sharing, etc. Traditional healthcare system often requires the delivery of medical data to the cloud, which involves users’ sensitive information and causes communication energy consumption. Practically, medical data sharing is a critical and challenging issue. Thus in this paper, we build up a novel healthcare system by utilizing the flexibility of cloudlet. The functions of cloudlet include privacy protection, data sharing and intrusion detection. In the stage of data collection, we first utilize Number Theory Research Unit (NTRU) method to encrypt user’s body data collected by wearable devices. Those data will be transmitted to nearby cloudlet in an energy efficient fashion. Secondly, we present a new trust model to help users to select trustable partners who want to share stored data in the cloudlet. The trust model also helps similar patients to communicate with each other about their diseases. Thirdly, we divide users’ medical data stored in remote cloud of hospital into three parts, and give them proper protection. Finally, in order to protect the healthcare system from malicious attacks, we develop a novel collaborative intrusion detection system (IDS) method based on cloudlet mesh, which can effectively prevent the remote healthcare big data cloud from attacks. Our experiments demonstrate the effectiveness of the proposed scheme.