A blockchain-based medical data preservation scheme for telecare medical information systems

Abstract

With rapid technological development, mobile computing and wireless transmission have become mature. These two technologies can be combined for sharing medical records on social networks, but doing so depends on the secure sharing of a patient’s data between Pervasive Social Network (PSN) nodes. Previous research has revealed that most human sensors cannot support very heavy computation, so the computation on the sensor node must be light. When a legitimate node is intercepted, an attacker may steal shared data of a third party through this intercepted node, causing security problems. Based on the aforementioned security and performance considerations, this study proposes a blockchain-based medical data preservation scheme for telecare medical information systems (TMISs), which consists of a medical sensor area authentication protocol and a social network information transfer protocol. The former protocol uses elliptic curve point multiplication to achieve secure data transfer between human sensors and mobile devices. The latter protocol stores data collected and transferred by mobile devices. The scheme herein is secure against several possible attacks and reduces the number of communication rounds below those of previously developed approaches. The social network information transfer protocol stores data using blockchain technology so that a data owner can authorize access to data by relevant users. Therefore, the proposed scheme improves upon not only the computing performance but also the security of previous approaches.