Attribute-Based Encryption With Blockchain Protection Scheme for Electronic Health Records

Abstract

In medical scenarios supported by edge clouds, it is difficult for patients to truly gain ownership of their electronic health records (EHRs). However, it is easy for doctors to modify hospital data to deny incorrect treatment records, which makes it difficult to protect the rights of patients. To improve patient control over EHRs, an attribute-based encryption protection scheme named CEC-ABE for EHRs combined with a blockchain is proposed to protect EHRs in edge cloud environments. In this scheme, the agreement process between the patient and the hospital is completed before the ABE stage, and the treatment information, including the treatment time, treatment doctor and additional information, is confidentially transmitted through an encryption algorithm. By storing the uploaded encrypted data in the blockchain in the form of transaction records, the integrity of the data is guaranteed, which facilitates the traceability of EHR generation. Access to EHRs is controlled by the ABE scheme of the outsourced ciphertext policy, and fine-grained attribute revocation can be employed to ensure the security of the ciphertext. The CEC-ABE algorithm, CP-ABE algorithm and other algorithms are experimentally tested, and the computational cost of each stage of the algorithms and the computational delay of each role are compared. CEC-ABE can significantly improve performance in key generation, outsourced decryption and other stages. Compared with the algorithm whose performance is second only to CEC-ABE, it reduces the computational overhead by 1.73% and 5.2%. The results show that the overall comprehensive performance of the CEC-ABE algorithm is better than that of the other algorithms.