A Lightweight Authentication and Authorization Framework for Blockchain-Enabled IoT Network in Health-Informatics

Abstract

Blockchain and IoT are being deployed at a large scale in various fields including healthcare for applications such as secure storage, transactions, and process automation. IoT devices are resource-constrained, have no capability of security and self-protection, and can easily be hacked or compromised. Furthermore, Blockchain is an emerging technology with immutability features which provide secure management, authentication, and guaranteed access control to IoT devices. IoT is a cloud-based internet service in which processing and collection of user’s data are accomplished remotely. Smart healthcare also requires the facility to provide the diagnosis of patients located remotely. The smart health framework faces critical issues such as data security, costs, memory, scalability, trust, and transparency between different platforms. Therefore, it is important to handle data integrity and privacy as the user’s authenticity is in question due to an open internet environment. Several techniques are available that primarily focus on resolving security issues i.e., forgery, timing, denial of service and stolen smartcard attacks, etc. Blockchain technology follows the rules of absolute privacy to identify the users associated with transactions. The motivation behind the use of Blockchain in health informatics is the removal of the centralized third party, immutability, improved data sharing, enhanced security, and reduced overhead costs in distributed applications. Healthcare informatics has some specific requirements associated with the security and privacy along with the additional legal requirements. This paper presents a novel authentication and authorization framework for Blockchain-enabled IoT networks using a probabilistic model. The proposed framework makes use of random numbers in the authentication process which is further connected through joint conditional probability. Hence, it establishes a secure connection among IoT devices for further data acquisition. The proposed model is validated and evaluated through extensive simulations using the AVISPA tool and the Cooja simulator, respectively. Experimental results analyses show that the proposed framework provides robust mutual authenticity, enhanced access control, and lowers both the communication and computational overhead cost as compared to others.

Literature Review on the Applications of Machine Learning and Blockchain Technology in Smart Healthcare Industry: A Bibliometric Analysis

“…BC follows absolute privacy rules to identify users related to transactions. It is mainly used for the management of information systems to help achieve secure storage, transactions, process automation, and other applications [ 3 ]. ML is the leading technology for performing complex analysis, intelligent judgment, and creative problem solving in healthcare [ 4 ].…”

Secure and Provenance Enhanced Internet of Health Things Framework: A Blockchain Managed Federated Learning Approach

“…Blockchain and an IPFS-based off-chain solution were used in to provide secure mobile cloud access [88] and secure EHR data sharing between patients and medical service providers, while keeping the personal data on the mobile device private. The probabilistic method has also been used in combination with blockchain to provide authentication and authorization for IoT data transactions [89] . Blockchain has been used to provide data assurance and resilience in an IoT network [90] .…”

Security, Privacy and Trust in IoMT Enabled Smart Healthcare System: A Systematic Review of Current and Future Trends

“…Muhammad Tahir et al [31] examined a framework for authentication and authorization mechanism which is lightweight to support blockchain-enabled IoT networks existing in healthinformatics. Random numbers are utilized in the authentication process that was linked by conditional joint probability.…”