A secure and privacy preserving model for healthcare applications based on blockchain-layered architecture

Abstract

Blockchain is one of the emerging technologies that are applied in various fields and its application in Healthcare 4.0 is crucial to handle the vast amount of health records that are growing continuously everyday. This paper explores the application of blockchain technology-based layered architecture integrated with Interplanetary File System (IPFS) storage to provide a secure and robust sharing platform for healthcare system. A multilayer security is provided in the proposed system including a 128-bit Random Deoxyribonucleic Acid (DNA) encoding sequence with a modified version of the 128-bit Advanced Encryption Standard (AES) key expansion symmetric key technique is being used before storing the records in the IPFS storage, Rivest–Shamir–Adleman (RSA) 2048 digital envelope is used for secure transmission of symmetric keys, RSA 1024 is used for digital signature, and Secure Hash Algorithm 256-bit (SHA-256) is used for hashing the record files. Comparative analysis with existing state-of-the-art in blockchain-based E-healthcare system is discussed. The performance of various assessment metrics is evaluated, including encryption and decryption time for EHR records, mining time, record retrieval time, smart contract execution time and network latency. Additionally, a reputation-based filtering mechanism specifically designed in the proposed model to detect and mitigate the various attacks.