A New Signature-Based Blockchain Paradigm: Foreseeable Impact on Healthcare Applications

Abstract

Blockchain is a promising technology that has the potential to revolutionize the healthcare sector's conventional IT infrastructure from centralized, isolated, and small-scale systems to decentralized, distributed, and highly scalable systems, resulting in a remarkable improvement in the quality of service, thereby eliminating expensive administrative inefficiencies. One of the most important challenges of the healthcare system is to maintain consistent patient data as well as unified files amongst numerous applications and programs. So, any attack or loss of data integrity and repudiation can lead to a wide range of potentially catastrophic repercussions, including inappropriate treatment, data theft, etc. As a result, a model is required that not only allows convenient data storage, access, and retrieval but also enables a transparent and traceable environment for verifying the integrity and authenticity of patient data. The work presented in this article is an integration of digital signature and blockchain technology. Here, a digital signature technique based on Hash-based Message Authentication Code (HMAC) is used which is an efficient method to achieve non-repudiation and mitigate Sybil attack. Furthermore, the integrity of data is ensured by the underlying blockchain technology. This advancement will enable the healthcare sector to achieve scalable improvement over the present system.