Abstract
Recently, researchers around the world in medical institutions and pharmaceutical companies are demanding a wider access to healthcare data for secondary use in order to provide enhanced and personalized medical services. For this purpose, healthcare information exchange between health authorities can be leveraged as a fundamental concept to meet these demands and enable the discovery of new insights and cures. However, health data are highly sensitive and private information that requires strong authentication and authorization procedures to manage the access to them. In this regard, the cloud paradigm has been used in these e-healthcare solutions, but they remain inefficient due to their inability to adapt to the expanding volume of data generated from body sensors and their vulnerability against cyberattacks. Hence, collaborative and distributed data governance supported by edge computing and blockchain promises enormous potentials in improving the performance and security of the whole system. In this paper, we present a secure and efficient data management framework, named ”EdgeMediChain”, for sharing health data. The proposed architecture leverages both edge computing and blockchain to facilitate and provide the necessary requirements for a healthcare ecosystem in terms of scalability, security, as well as privacy. The Ethereum-based testbed evaluations show the effectiveness of EdgeMediChain in terms of execution time with a reduction of nearly 84.75% for 2000 concurrent transactions, higher throughput compared to a traditional blockchain, and scalable ledger storage with a linear growth rate.
Highlights
The large aging population worldwide and the drastically increasing number of people suffering from long-lasting diseases, like diabetes, have been and still remain a major struggle for health institutions throughout the globe
3) We implement a prototype based on the Ethereum blockchain platform to validate and evaluate the feasibility as well as the performance of the proposed EdgeMediChain architecture that we compare against a traditional approach, we evaluate the performance of our proposed architecture under different configurations
We proposed a decentralized MIoT authentication scheme which is different than the already existing blockchain-based schemes in the literature as it does authenticate the users part of the system, but it is aimed towards solving the issue of counterfeit devices and firmware updates which are two crucial aspects of MIoT, as medical devices are getting more attention recently they are becoming the target of hackers and are not getting the required and needed security management
Summary
The large aging population worldwide and the drastically increasing number of people suffering from long-lasting diseases, like diabetes, have been and still remain a major struggle for health institutions throughout the globe. The possibility of integration is rooted in the fact that both networks are based on decentralized infrastructures, the need of integration comes from the diverse advantages of blockchain and edge computing as well as their joint interdependent features By combining both technologies in our system we aim to provide a secure framework to fulfill the requirements of a healthcare data sharing ecosystem, while taking into account the network storage and computational resources, which meet the essence of blockchain and the overall capacity of edge computing. Than the already existing blockchain-based frameworks in the literature [26]–[28], EdgeMediChain leverages the edge computing paradigm to ensure availability and parallelized high performance, precisely, in terms of handling the astonishing amount of monitored data generated from the IoT devices and body sensors, the blockchain technology was adopted to provide the required privacy and security in the process of sharing health data. 4) We analyze the security performance of our proposed authentication/authorization schemes in terms of confidentiality, integrity, transparency, and privacy
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