Access Control and Privacy-Preserving Blockchain-Based System for Diseases Management

Abstract

In many developing countries, the healthcare sector is facing several challenges, mainly due to the lack of personal, institutions, and medications in public health systems. Over the past decade, information and communication technology has proved its ability to improve medical quality, reduce costs, and promote data security. Developing countries can exploit these technologies to improve the healthcare process and ensure remote health monitoring, especially in rural areas. The Internet of Things and smart medical devices are widely used to provide remote patient monitoring. Current systems are based on centralized communication with cloud servers. However, this architecture increases several security and privacy risks. The adoption of a distributed architecture is required to overcome these issues. In this article, we describe a Blockchain-based system for securing Internet-of-Things (IoT) healthcare devices. In addition to data encryption, we propose to use Blockchain technology to enhance security and privacy in healthcare systems. The system is intended to allow remote patient monitoring, particularly for chronic diseases that necessitate regular monitoring. Three important characteristics were taken into account: security, scalability, and processing time. The security concerns are ensured by using the re-encryption proxy in conjunction with Blockchain to encrypt data and control access to it. To ensure Blockchain scalability, data are stored in an InterPlanetary file system (IPFS) off-chain database. We use an Ethereum Blockchain based on proof of authority (PoA) to speed up the data storage. In comparison to existing methods, the experimental system has shown a significant improvement in the security of healthcare systems.