Attribute-based encryption has been a promising encryption technology to secure personal health records (PHRs) sharing in cloud computing. PHRs consist of the patient data often collected from various sources including hospitals and general practice centres. Different patients' access policies have a common access sub-policy. In this paper, we propose a novel attribute-based encryption scheme for fine-grained and flexible access control to PHRs data in cloud computing. The scheme generates shared information by the common access sub-policy which is based on different patients' access policies. Then the scheme combines the encryption of PHRs from different patients. Therefore, both time consumption of encryption and decryption can be reduced. Medical staff require varying levels of access to PHRs. The proposed scheme can also support multi-privilege access control so that medical staff can access the required level of information while maximizing patient privacy. Through implementation and simulation, we demonstrate that the proposed scheme is efficient in terms of time. Moreover, We prove the security of the proposed scheme based on security of the ciphertext-policy attribute-based encryption scheme.

With the rapid development of cloud computing, it is playing an increasingly important role in data sharing. Meanwhile, attribute-based encryption (ABE) has been an effective way to share data securely in cloud computing. In real circumstances, there is often a mutual access sub-policy in different providers’ access policies, and the significance of each attribute is usual diverse. In this paper, a secure and efficient data-sharing scheme in cloud computing, which is called unified ciphertext-policy weighted attribute-based encryption (UCP-WABE), is proposed. The weighted attribute authority assigns weights to attributes depending on their importance. The mutual information extractor extracts the mutual access sub-policy and generates the mutual information. Thus, UCP-WABE lowers the total encryption time cost of multiple providers. We prove that UCP-WABE is selectively secure on the basis of the security of ciphertext-policy weighted attribute-based encryption (CP-WABE). Additionally, the results of the implementation shows that UCP-WABE is efficient in terms of time.