Secure Outsourced Blockchain-Based Medical Data Sharing System Using Proxy Re-Encryption

Young-Hoon Park,Shin-Ok Lee,Yejin Kim,Kwangman Ko

doi:10.3390/app11209422

Young-Hoon Park, Shin-Ok Lee + Show 2 more

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https://doi.org/10.3390/app11209422

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Journal: Applied sciences	Publication Date: Oct 11, 2021
Citations: 10	License type: CC BY 4.0

Affiliation: Sookmyung Women's University, Sangji University

Abstract

The security and privacy of electronic health records (EHRs) have received considerable attention from healthcare workers and researchers. To ensure security, various encryption and decryption schemes as well as key management protocols have been developed. However, owing to sharing and scalability issues, additional security technologies have been proposed. Nonetheless, these technologies cause other problems, such as efficiency issues. Blockchain-based EHR management systems have been proposed to overcome computational overhead. However, because most blockchain systems are installed by outsourcing companies, EHRs may be leaked to the company. Hence, we herein propose a blockchain-based EHR management scheme with proxy re-encryption. In this scheme, we set a proxy server that re-encrypts the ciphertext between file servers, thereby solving EHR sharing issues. Furthermore, because the server is separated from the blockchain system, the outsourcing company cannot manipulate the server or access the records. In addition, the blockchain assists in access control by using smart contracts, thereby enabling secure and efficient EHR sharing. By performing security analysis, we prove that our proposed scheme solves the aforementioned security problems. In addition, we experimentally demonstrate the efficient operation of the proposed system.

Highlights

Preserving the security and privacy of massive medical data is a key issue in most healthcare institutes [1,2,3]
In the Introduction, we argued that the electronic health records (EHRs) can be leaked to the outsourcing company because the company may disregard the smart contract in the blockchain
Pairing-based cryptography library 0.5.14 [48] and OpenSSL 1.1.1f library were used for Proxy re-encryption (PRE) and advanced encryption standard (AES) cryptography, respectively

Summary

Introduction

Preserving the security and privacy of massive medical data is a key issue in most healthcare institutes [1,2,3]. The system that efficiently manages the significant volume of medical data must be focused on. Security issues in healthcare systems with mobile devices are addressed, and possible solutions are provided in [9,10]. When using these classical cryptography schemes, issues arising from massive medical data and the efficient sharing of problems cannot be solved [8]. To overcome such problems, blockchain has been proposed recently [5]

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