What is SHIELDSMART?
With the widespread adoption of electronic health records and the dramatic reduction of sequencing costs, efficient storage, sharing and analysis of biomedical big data are becoming challenge problems. Public cloud computing is emerging as one of the promising technical solutions to enable cost-effective data outsourcing. However, biomedical data security and privacy need to be ensured during their entire lifecycle. Direct utilization of existing cloud computing model may expose the sensitive biomedical data to riks, due to the shared-resource nature of public cloud. Thus, it is essential to develop a decentralized data storage, sharing and analysis outsourcing platform, which can flexibly utilize the existing elastic cloud computing resources. The decentralized design allows individual data user and owner to collaborate with each other without requiring a centralized authority, which is usually unavailable in many real-world situations. In SHIELDSMART, we will accomplish above goals through combining different state-of-the art cryptographic technologies to develop practical tools that enable secure and decentralized collaboration and outsourcing of sensitive biomedical data in the cloud. The outcomes of this project will allow data owners to privately store their sensitive biomedical data and control access to them on a decentralized cloud environment, as well as enable shared data analysis to be protected through secure computation over encrypted data. Furthermore, all data transactions (e.g., deposit, amendment, shared access, analysis, etc.) will be securely and immutably logged in the proposed framework, which can be securely audited at anytime by authorized entities. This project will facilitate biomedical researchers to make better use of the cloud computing resources while mitigating the security and privacy risks.