Blockchain-based public key encryption with keyword search for medical data sharing in cloud environment

Abstract

The cloud-based sharing of electronic health data (EHDs) has great significance in researching diseases, doctors’ diagnoses and various fields. In this paper, we applied the potentiality of both blockchain and public key searchable encryption to build a medical data-sharing platform. In recent years, blockchain has emerged as a promising solution for medical data sharing with security and privacy preservation due to its immutability, decentralization, anonymity and verifiability advantages. Two kinds of blockchains, private blockchain and consortium blockchain, are used in our model. In our model, we have designed a consortium blockchain of preselected users. To achieve data security, access control, privacy preservation and secure search, public key encryption with keyword search (PEKS) technology is used here. According to the security proof, our proposed scheme is indistinguishable under the keyword guessing attack. The outcomes of the performance analysis and comparison simulations reveal that the proposed scheme performs better than other related schemes.