Personal health records (PHRs) are valuable assets to individuals because they enable them to integrate and manage their medical data. A PHR is an electronic application through which patients can manage their health information. Giving patients control over their medical data offers an advantageous realignment of the doctor-patient dynamic. However, today's PHR management systems fall short of giving reliable, traceable, trustful, and secure patients control over their medical data, which poses serious threats to their authenticity and accuracy. Moreover, most of the current approaches and systems leveraged for managing PHR are centralized that not only make medical data sharing difficult but also pose a risk of single point of failure problem. In this paper, we propose Ethereum blockchain-based smart contracts to give patients control over their data in a manner that is decentralized, immutable, transparent, traceable, trustful, and secure. The proposed system employs decentralized storage of interplanetary file systems (IPFS) and trusted reputation-based re-encryption oracles to securely fetch, store, and share patients' medical data. We present algorithms along with their full implementation details. We evaluate the proposed smart contracts using two important performance metrics, such as cost and correctness. Furthermore, we provide security analysis and discuss the generalization aspects of our solution. We outline the limitations of the proposed approach. We make the smart contract source code publicly available on Github. INDEX TERMS Blockchain, Ethereum, smart contracts, personal health records, healthcare, access control.
Multi-party authorization (MPA) typically involves multiple parties to control and grant access to shared data. MPA is used to solve the insider's attack problem by ensuring that a single authority or party is not acting alone. Currently, almost all existing implementations of MPA are centralized and fall short in providing logs and events related to provenance of granting permissions in a trusted, secure, immutable, auditable, and decentralized manner. Moreover, for sharing data, proxy re-encryption algorithms are often used to give secure access to encrypted shared data. These schemes and algorithms are also centralized and cannot be trusted. In this paper, we propose a fully decentralized blockchain-based solution in which MPA is implemented using Ethereum smart contracts, and proxy re-encryption algorithms (which are computationally expensive) are implemented using multiple oracles to give access to encrypted shared data stored on a public and decentralized storage platform, such as the Interplanetary File Systems (IPFS). The smart contracts help to validate results based on the majority of encrypted results determined by the oracles. For this, we incorporate reputation mechanisms in the proposed smart contracts to rate the oracles based on their malicious and non-malicious behaviors. We present algorithms along with their full implementation, testing, and validation details. We evaluate the proposed system in terms of security, cost, and generalization to show its reliability and practicality. We make the smart contract source code publicly available on Github.
Personal health records (PHRs) are valuable assets to individuals because they enable them to integrate and manage their medical data. A PHR is an electronic application through which patients can manage their health information. Giving patients control over their medical data offers an advantageous realignment of the doctor-patient dynamic. However, today's PHR management systems fall short of giving reliable, traceable, trustful, and secure patients control over their medical data, which poses serious threats to their authenticity and accuracy. Moreover, most of the current approaches and systems leveraged for managing PHR are centralized that not only make medical data sharing difficult but also poses a risk of single point of failure problem. In this paper, we propose Ethereum blockchain-based smart contracts to give patients control over their data in a manner that is decentralized, immutable, transparent, traceable, trustful, and secure. The proposed system employs decentralized storage of interplanetary file systems (IPFS), proxy re-encryption, and trusted reputation-based oracles to securely fetch, store, and share patients' medical data. We present algorithms along with their full implementation details. We evaluate the proposed smart contracts using two important performance metrics, such as cost and correctness. Furthermore, we provide security analysis and discuss the generalization aspects of our solution. We outline the limitations of the proposed approach. We make the smart contract source code publicly available on Github.
Reputation expresses the beliefs or opinions about someone or something that are held by an individual or by a community. Reputation Management Systems (RMSs) handle representation, computation, and storage of reputation in some quantitative form, suitable for grounding trust relations among parties. Quantifying reputation is important in situations, like online service provision, which involve interaction between parties who do not know (and potentially distrust) each other. The basic idea is to let parties rate each other. When a party is considered for interaction, its ratings can be aggregated in order to derive a score for deciding whether to trust it or not. While much valuable research work has been done on reputation-based trust schemes, the problem of establishing collective trust in the reputation management system itself has never been fully solved. Recently, several researchers have put forward the idea of using Distributed Ledger Technology (DLT) as the foundation for implementing trustworthy RMSs. The purpose of this paper is to identify some critical problems that arise when DLTs are used in order to manage evidence about previous interaction and compute reputations. The paper proposes some practical solutions and describes methods to deploy them on top of standard DLT of the Ethereum family.
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