Data Protection in Internet of Medical Things Using Blockchain and Secret Sharing Method

Abstract

Internet of Medical Things (IoMT) combines Internet of Things (IoT)with medical devices to facilitate healthcare, providing affordable solutions, and faster treatments to patients. An increase in IoMT use hasled to several security/privacy challenges, since many IoMT devices havenot been designed with security and privacy features in mind, whichmakes them vulnerable to attacks. Furthermore, as security risks andthreats affect all the layers developed for IoMT-based architectures, anIoMT network must follow stricter privacy and security specificationscompared to other IoT devices. In order to address this, we present anew IoT-based architecture to improve the data privacy, security, andintegrity leveraging distributed InterPlanetary File System (IPFS) storage and blockchain. The data captured from medical devices is split intomultiple encrypted pieces using Secret Sharing Algorithm (SSA) andthese pieces are then stored in distributed IPFS storage hosted on edgeand cloud servers, and their copies are verifiable by a blockchain network. The applied SSA method ensures that even if a piece of data iscompromised, the original data is neither leaked nor lost. Our proposedarchitecture is implemented and tested on an IoMT-based monitoring system to investigate its feasibility, scalability, and performance.