A User Authentication and Access Control Scheme for IoT-Based Healthcare Using Blockchain

Abstract

IoT devices do not possess the potential to protect themselves from risk of the attackers as they are resource-constrained. Blockchain is arising as a decentralized and distributed technology with proficiency in delivering secure management, access control and user authentication for protecting data and services of IoT devices, guaranteeing integrity, confidentiality and availability. IoT-based healthcare applications has many benefits like reduced cost of healthcare, improved quality, remote monitoring of patients etc. Ensuring a robust and secure interactions between patient and healthcare providers is very important to protect sensitive medical data. A distributed and reliable user authentication and access control scheme to be used in IoT based Healthcare is designed and implemented here with the help of local gateways directly interfaced to smart contract based Ethereum Blockchain. The local gateways can manage multiple local IoT devices and improve scalability. This reduces the overhead of performing resource-consuming authentication tasks and blockchain-communication at the IoT devices. To exhibit the working of the framework, a case study is presented with two laptops and a Raspberry Pi.