Blockchain-Empowered Secure and Privacy-Preserving Health Data Sharing in Edge-Based IoMT

Abstract

Health data sharing, as a booming demand, enables the patients with similar symptoms to connect with each other and doctors to obtain the medical history of patients. Health data are usually collected from edge-based Internet of medical things (IoMT) with devices such as smart wearable devices, smart watches, and smartphones. Since health data are highly private and have great financial value, adversaries ceaselessly launch diverse attacks to obtain private information. All these issues pose great challenges to health data sharing in edge-based IoMT scenarios. Existing research either lacks comprehensive consideration of privacy and security protection or fails to provide a proper incentive mechanism, which expels users from sharing data. In this study, we propose a novel blockchain-assisted data sharing scheme, which allows secure and privacy-preserving profile matching. A bloom filter with hash functions is designed to verify the authenticity of keyword ciphertext. Key-policy attribute-based encryption (KP-ABE) algorithm and smart contracts are employed to achieve secure profile matching. To incentivize users actively participating in profile matching, we devise an incentive mechanism and construct a two-phase Stackelberg game to address pricing problems for data owners and accessing problems of data requesters. The optimal pricing mechanism is specially designed for encouraging more users to participate in health data sharing and maximizing users’ profit. Moreover, security analysis illustrates that the proposed protocol is capable of satisfying various security goals, while performance evaluation shows high scalability and feasibility of the proposed scheme in edge-based IoMT scenarios.