Blockchain-Aided Privacy-Preserving Medical Data Sharing Scheme for E-Healthcare System

Abstract

Due to the massive applications of Internet of Things (IoT) and the prevalence of wearable devices, e-healthcare systems are widely deployed in medical institutions. As a significant carrier of medical data, electronic medical record (EMR) is convenient to be stored and retrieved, which greatly simplifies the experience of medical treatment and cuts down the trivial work of paramedics. However, EMRs usually include much sensitive information such as patients’ identification numbers or home addresses that may be easily captured by unauthorized doctors and cloud servers. Based on this concern, e-healthcare systems can make use of attribute-based encryption (ABE) to protect private information while achieving fine-grained access control of encrypted EMRs. Whereas, most ABE schemes do not support both policy hiding and keyword search. To address the above issues, we propose an inner product searchable encryption scheme with multi-keyword search (MK-IPSE) based on blockchain to provide full privacy preservation and efficient ciphertext retrieval for EMRs. Inner product encryption (IPE) can not only specify access permissions such that only users with matched attributes can get the target files, but also support access policy hiding. Besides, the proposed scheme combines searchable encryption (SE) and federated blockchain (FB) to implement efficient and stable multi-keyword search. Compared with the existing schemes, MK-IPSE shows better performance on computation and storage. Additionally, security analysis demonstrates that our scheme can resist IND-CKA and collusion attacks.