An Enhanced Linkable Anonymous Access Protocol of the Distributed Electronic Patient Records

This paper describes the growing concern of privacy and security in e-health applications. Sharing sensitive patient data in a distributed environment introduces security and privacy risks. Therefore, there are increasing demands to provide secure access to distributed Electronic Patient Records (EPRs) but without compromising performance. The aim of this paper is to respond to such demands and to support secure and efficient access to distributed EPRs. In this paper, we enhance the Linkable Anonymous Access Protocol while supporting security and performance. To achieve this, we have designed a secure protocol called the Enhanced Linkable Anonymous Access (ELAA) protocol. To show that the ELAA protocol is secure and efficient, (1) we formally verify and analyse it against security properties using the Casper/FDR2 verification tool. In addition, (2) we build a prototype using the Java technology to demonstrate the performance of the enhanced protocol. By doing this, we prove that the ELAA protocol maintains a good balance between security and performance while supporting distributed access to EPRs.