A secure and trustworthy medical record sharing scheme based on searchable encryption and blockchain

Abstract

In this paper, we demonstrate the potential of using both blockchain and searchable encryption to build a medical data-sharing platform. The latter is designed to allow one to uniformly search for patients' (encrypted) data in different medical institutions. Building on the assumption that medical records are stored locally by the hospital, we use smart contracts to build a global encrypted search index and a verification index for multiple data owners on the blockchain. In our approach, fully functional access control is provided to ensure that patients and medical institutions can control access to the data. This allows the user to promptly verify the integrity of the results after the search. Our approach also supports the addition, modification, and deletion of medical records, and it complies with the requirements of forward security. The experimental results on the local Ethereum network show that our scheme efficiently facilitates secure data sharing.