Enabling trustworthy personal data protection in eHealth and well-being services through privacy-by-design

Abstract

Users are each day more aware of their privacy and data protection. Although this problem is transversal to every digital service, it is especially relevant when critical and personal information is managed, as in eHealth and well-being services. During the last years, many different innovative services in this area have been proposed. However, data management challenges are still in need of a solution. In general, data are directly sent to services but no trustworthy instruments to recover these data or remove them from services are available. In this scheme, services become the users’ data owners although users keep the rights to access, modify, and be forgotten. Nevertheless, the adequate implementation of these rights is not guaranteed, as services use the received data with commercial purposes. In order to address and solve this situation, we propose a new trustworthy personal data protection mechanism for well-being services, based on privacy-by-design technologies. This new mechanism is based on Blockchain networks and indirection functions and tokens. Blockchain networks execute transparent smart contracts, where users’ rights are codified, and store the users’ personal data which are never sent or given to external services. Besides, permissions and privacy restrictions designed by users to be applied to their data and services consuming them are also implemented in these smart contracts. Finally, an experimental validation is also described to evaluate the Quality of Experience (in terms of user satisfaction) and Quality of Service (in terms of processing delay) compared to traditional service provision solutions.

Data Authentication and Anonymization in IoT Scenarios and Future 5G Networks Using Chaotic Digital Watermarking

“…The proposed pseudorandom routing protocol, then, employs a chaotic encryption function (•), see Section III.C, to protect the received information. An encrypted information ℑ is then obtained (8).…”

“…Cryptographic technologies may address this problem, but IoT devices face important problems in that field. First, most IoT nodes are resource constrained, so they cannot support complex and computationally heavy algorithms, such as modern symmetric key encryption schemes [8]. Besides, IoT systems are many times deployed in geographically remote areas with no physical protection, so solutions based on private keys stored in devices' memory turn unsecure (as an intruder could easily extract that memory from the node and employ fraudulently the private key) [8].…”

“…First, most IoT nodes are resource constrained, so they cannot support complex and computationally heavy algorithms, such as modern symmetric key encryption schemes [8]. Besides, IoT systems are many times deployed in geographically remote areas with no physical protection, so solutions based on private keys stored in devices' memory turn unsecure (as an intruder could easily extract that memory from the node and employ fraudulently the private key) [8]. Other innovative mechanisms such as Physical Unclonable Functions (PUF) have been successfully employed in these scenarios [9], but they cannot solve all the previously described challenges.…”

Analysis of factors affecting IoT-based smart hospital design

“…Many different innovative solutions in this context have been proposed in the literature. Some of them are; [79] proposed a Blockchain-based solution that follows edge computing to guarantee privacy by considering regulation and users' designed requirements. Sun et al [80] proposed an optimized vector conversion approach and emphasized that by creating key generation, encryption and decryption stages with this approach, users can easily perform in the system without leaking any sensitive privacy.…”

Internet of things for health and well-being applications

“…Still, in many infrastructures like the ones mentioned above, one of the prime concerns is privacy. This is addressed by Robles et al 8 who devised a new personal data protection mechanism for well-being services based on blockchain networks mainly characterised by transparency, accuracy, accountability, and others. This new architecture follows the PbD principles and edge computing paradigm.…”