Blockchain for the Management of Internet of Things Devices in the Medical Industry

Abstract

With the recent emergence of the smart healthcare era, and patients relying more on personalized health monitoring based on Internet of Medical Things (IoMT) devices; patients’ lives are becoming highly threatened in case they fall victim to counterfeit devices. Thus, verifying whether these body sensors utilized are authentic and reliable in an unimpeachable, credible, and auditable manner without any centralized management is of crucial importance. Furthermore, manipulating data and hijacking in an IoMT context are also of tremendous criticality. Motivated by the aforementioned challenges, in this article, a smart contract-based scalable authentication scheme dedicated for IoMT devices is proposed. The scheme mitigates the deficiencies of the traditional established systems that are extensively built on centralized approaches, vulnerable to distributed denial of service attacks, by leveraging blockchain’s decentralization and security properties. The scheme ensures confidentiality, anonymity, and privacy as it is built on a consortium blockchain and integrity by offering secure firmware updates and protects patients from counterfeit devices by leveraging the physical unclonable function. The authentication approach was implemented on Ethereum and evaluated with regard to its computation and communication costs to prove its feasibility and effectiveness as well as its security by presenting a formal analysis using ProVerif.