Secure cloud-based healthcare data management for privacy-preserving storage

With the rapid adoption of cloud computing, organizations increasingly rely on cloud storage for managing sensitive data, such as healthcare records. However, healthcare data management in cloud environments faces significant security challenges, including unauthorized access, data breaches and privacy risks. To address these challenges, this work presents to protect sensitive patient information in the cloud from unauthorized access, cyber threats, and data breaches while enabling secure retrieval and processing for healthcare applications. Healthcare data is gathered from multi-speciality hospitals. This data undergoes key generation using Hash-based Message Authentication Code-based Key Derivation Function to produce a secure cryptographic approach to derive encryption keys. Following this, end-to-end encryption using Advanced Encryption Standard in Galois/Counter Mode ensures confidentiality, protecting data from unauthorized access. The encrypted data is then stored in a secure cloud environment, where it remains protected from external threats. To facilitate controlled access, Zero Trust Architecture and access control mechanisms authenticate users and grant permissions based on strict security policies. When a verified user requests access, the system enforces fine-grained access control, ensuring that only authorized individuals retrieve decrypted information. Finally, the entire process ensures privacy-preserving data sharing, allowing healthcare professionals to securely access and share data without compromising security or compliance. Results demonstrate that key generation time increases from 0.5 ms (128-bit) to 6.0 ms (1024-bit), while security strength improves from 60% to 99.5% as the key size increases. Additionally, data upload performance analysis shows cloud transmission time dominates total upload time, reaching 30 seconds for 500 MB files. The proposed approach enhances security, scalability and efficiency, ensuring robust protection for cloud-stored healthcare data.