Attribute-based Multi-Signature and Encryption for EHR Management: A Blockchain-based Solution

Abstract

The global Electronic Health Record (EHR) market is growing dramatically and has already hit $31.5 billion in 2018. To safeguard the security of EHR data and privacy of patients, fine-grained information access and sharing mechanisms are essential for EHR management. This paper proposes a hybrid architecture of blockchain and edge nodes to facilitate EHR management. In this architecture, we utilize attribute-based multi-signature (ABMS) scheme to authenticate user's signatures without revealing the sensitive information and multi-authority attribute-based encryption (ABE) scheme to encrypt EHR data which is stored on the edge node. We develop the blockchain module on Hyperledger Fabric platform and the ABMS module on Hyperledger Ursa library. We measure the signing and verifying time of the ABMS scheme under different settings, and experiment with the authentication events and access activities which are logged as transactions in blockchain.

A Metaheuristic Approach for Encrypting Blockchain Data Attributes Using Ciphertext Policy Technique

“…Encryption/decryption key management Scheme [7] Symmetric encryption ✓ ✓ X X Scheme [8] Hash synchronization X X --Proposed scheme Attribute-based encryption ✓ ✓ ✓ ✓…”

“…Based on the coarse-grained data access and data encryption issues mentioned above, a corresponding solution was also proposed in the official version update of Hyperledger, that is, symmetric data encryption on the chain [7]. By symmetrically encrypting the plaintext data and then on the chain, in this way, only users with a symmetric decryption key can obtain the actual plaintext data.…”

A Cooperative Architecture of Data Offloading and Sharing for Smart Healthcare with Blockchain

“…Also, privacy issues for health data offloading were also solved in [5], [10] by using consensus algorithms and learning-based privacy preservation techniques with respect to response time and delay. However, the above studies lack the joint consideration of all QoS constraints (network latency, energy consumption and memory usage) and privacy awareness, which is of significant importance for offloading performance guarantees [2].…”

“…The recent advances of cloud computing, edge computing and Internet of Things (IoT) technologies, have empowered e-health services [1], [2]. In modern e-healthcare, health data collected from mobile devices-MD (i.e.…”

“…Moreover, the EHRs storage on central cloud adds communication overhead for data retrieval, although it requires less data management efforts. Third, it is not straightforward to implement secure data sharing in e-health networks where there is often a lack of transparency and trust among participants [2]. Attackers or curious users can access health data without users' permission, leading to leakage risks of sensitive patient information.…”