Patient-Centric Token-Based Healthcare Blockchain Implementation Using Secure Internet of Medical Things

Abstract

Security and privacy are becoming increasingly difficult to preserve in today’s fast-growing data world. We use the Internet of Medical Things (IoMT) to make quick diagnoses and get results. IoMT devices measure the human body’s functioning in various parameters and collect, process, and store data in cloud servers. There is a public channel used to collect data from humans and send it to the cloud, which is highly unreliable and vulnerable to attacks. Another risk is storing data in a single centralized system, which can be vulnerable to a single-point failure. Blockchain is being used for secure data storage in a decentralized manner to avoid single-point failure. We propose a secure IoMT-based data collection method for patients and storing the data on the blockchain in accordance with general data protection regulation (GDPR). In the proposed system, IoMT devices send data to the cloud via the patient’s personal digital assistant (PDA), and the cloud server transacts data on the blockchain. We propose a miner selection algorithm to avoid bias in the blockchain. We simulate various attacks on open channels between IoMT devices and the cloud servers. This scheme is implemented on a custom Python-based blockchain. IoT simulation is performed using the Bevywise IoT simulator and the message queuing telemetry transport (MQTT) simulator. The security protocol is analyzed using Scyther.