Secure Blockchain Transactions for Electronic Health Records based on an Improved Attribute-Based Signature Scheme (IASS)

Electronic Health Records (EHRs) are entirely controlled by hospitals, not patients, making it difficult to obtain medical advice from individual hospitals. Patients need to keep tabs on their health details and take back control of their medical data. The rapid development of blockchain technology has facilitated large-scale healthcare, including medical records and patient-related data. The technology provides comprehensive and immutable patient records and free access to electronic medical records for providers and treatment portals. To ensure the validity of the blockchain-connected EHR, the Improved Attribute-Based Signature Scheme (IASS) has considerable powers, allowing patients to approve messages based on attributes but not validated. In addition, it avoids the problem of having multiple authorities without a single or central source of trust for generating and distributing patient public/private keys and fits into the blockchain model for distributed data storage. By sharing a secret, pseudo-random activity seed between authorities, the protocol resists collusive attacks by corrupt officials. The technology provides patients with a comprehensive, immutable record and free access to their EHR from providers and treatment portals. To ensure the validity of blockchain-connected EHRs, propose an attribute-based multi-authority signature scheme that authorizes messages based on their attributes without revealing any information

Internet of Thing Based Confidential Healthcare Data Storage, Access Control and Monitoring Using Blockchain Technique

Internet of Things plays a significant role in multiple sectors like agriculture, manufacturing and healthcare for collecting information to automation. The collected information is in different diversity and consists of confidential and non-confidential information. Secure handling of confidential data is a crucial task in cloud computing like storage, access control and monitoring. The blockchain based storage technique provides immutable data storage, efficient access control and dynamic monitoring to confidential data. Thus, the secure internet of things data storage, access control and monitoring using blockchain technique is proposed in this work. The patients health information that are in different formats are pruned by a decision tree algorithm and it classifies the confidential data and non-confidential data by the fuzzy rule classification technique. Depending on data owner's willing, the fuzzy rule is framed and the confidential and non-confidential data collected by internet of things sensors are classified. To provide confidentiality to confidential data, Attribute Based Encryption is applied to confidential data and stored in an off-chain mode of blockchain instead of entire data encryption and storage. The non-confidential data is stored in a plaintext form in cloud storage. When compared to support vector machine, K-nearest neighbor and Naive Bayes classification techniques, the proposed fuzzy rule based confidential data identification produces greater than 96 % of accuracy based on data owner willing and confidential data storage takes lesser than 20 % of storage space and processing time in an entire data storage. Additionally, the blockchain performances like throughput, network scalability and latency is optimized through minimal block size and transactions. Thus, our experimental results show that the proposed blockchain based internet of things data storage, access control and monitoring technique provides better confidentiality and access control to confidential data than the conventional cloud storage technique with lesser processing time

BMSQABSE: Design of a Bioinspired Model to Improve Security & QoS Performance for Blockchain-Powered Attribute-based Searchable Encryption Applications

Attribute-based searchable encryption (ABSE) is a sub-field of security models that allow intensive searching capabilities for cloud-based shared storage applications. ABSE Models require higher computational power, which limits their application to high-performance computing devices. Moreover, ABSE uses linear secret sharing scheme (LSSS), which requires larger storage when compared with traditional encryption models. To reduce computational complexity, and optimize storage cost, various researchers have proposed use of Machine Learning Models (MLMs), that assist in identification & removal of storage & computational redundancies. But most of these models use static reconfiguration, thus cannot be applied to large-scale deployments. To overcome this limitation, a novel combination of Grey Wolf Optimization (GWO) with Particle Swarm Optimization (PSO) model to improve Security & QoS performance for Blockchain-powered Attribute-based Searchable Encryption deployments is proposed in this text. The proposed model augments ABSE parameters to reduce its complexity and improve QoS performance under different real-time user request scenarios. It intelligently selects cyclic source groups with prime order & generator values to create bilinear maps that are used for ABSE operations. The PSO Model assists in generation of initial cyclic population, and verifies its security levels, QoS levels, and deployment costs under multiple real-time cloud scenarios. Based on this initial analysis, the GWO Model continuously tunes ABSE parameters in order to achieve better QoS & security performance levels via stochastic operations. The proposed BMSQABSE model was tested under different cloud configurations, and its performance was evaluated for healthcare deployments. Based on this evaluation, it was observed that the proposed model achieved 8.3% lower delay, with 4.9% lower energy consumption, 14.5% lower storage requirements when compared with standard ABSE models. It was able to mitigate Distributed Denial of Service (DDoS), Masquerading, Finney, and Sybil attacks, which assists in deploying the proposed model for QoS-aware highly secure deployments

R-PEKS: RBAC Enabled PEKS for Secure Access of Cloud Data

In the recent past, few works have been done by combining attribute-based access control with multi-user PEKS, i.e., public key encryption with keyword search. Such attribute enabled searchable encryption is most suitable for applications where the changing of privileges is done once in a while. However, to date, no efficient and secure scheme is available in the literature that is suitable for these applications where changing privileges are done frequently. In this paper our contributions are twofold. Firstly, we propose a new PEKS scheme for string search, which, unlike the previous constructions, is free from bi-linear mapping and is efficient by 97% compared to PEKS for string search proposed by Ray et.al in TrustCom 2017. Secondly, we introduce role based access control (RBAC) to multi-user PEKS, where an arbitrary group of users can search and access the encrypted files depending upon roles. We termed this integrated scheme as R-PEKS. The efficiency of R-PEKS over the PEKS scheme is up to 90%. We provide formal security proofs for the different components of R-PEKS and validate these schemes using a commercial dataset

A Survey on Off-chain Networks: Frameworks, Technologies, Solutions and Challenges

Blockchain has received increasing attention in academia and industry. However, the increasing transaction volumes and limited on-chain storage underscore scalability as a key challenge hindering the widespread adoption of blockchain. Fortunately, off-chain networks that enable transactions outside the blockchain show promising potential to mitigate the scalability challenge. Off-chain solutions that address blockchain scalability hurdles, such as payment channel networks, facilitate secure and fast off-chain transactions, thus relieving the main chain's strain. In this article, we provide a comprehensive review of key technologies, solutions, and challenges of off-chain networks. First, we introduce the background of off-chain networks encompassing design motivation, framework, overview, and application scenarios. We then review the key issues and technologies associated with off-chain networks. Subsequently, we summarize the mainstream solutions for the corresponding key issues. Finally, we discuss some research challenges and open issues in this area.Comment: 30 pages, 5 figure

Blockchain-aided privacy-preserving medical data sharing scheme for e-healthcare system

Due to the massive applications of Internet of Things (IoT) and the prevalence of wearable devices, e-healthcare systems are widely deployed in medical institutions. As a significant carrier of medical data, electronic medical record (EMR) is convenient to be stored and retrieved, which greatly simplifies the experience of medical treatment and cuts down the trivial work of paramedics. However, EMRs usually include much sensitive information such as patients’ identification numbers or home addresses that may be easily captured by unauthorized doctors and cloud servers. Based on this concern, e-healthcare systems can make use of attribute-based encryption (ABE) to protect private information while achieving fine-grained access control of encrypted EMRs. Whereas, most ABE schemes do not support both policy hiding and keyword search. To address the above issues, we propose an inner product searchable encryption scheme with multi-keyword search (MK-IPSE) based on blockchain to provide full privacy preservation and efficient ciphertext retrieval for EMRs. Inner product encryption (IPE) can not only specify access permissions such that only users with matched attributes can get the target files, but also support access policy hiding. Besides, the proposed scheme combines searchable encryption (SE) and federated blockchain (FB) to implement efficient and stable multi-keyword search. Compared with the existing schemes, MK-IPSE shows better performance on computation and storage. Additionally, security analysis demonstrates that our scheme can resist IND-CKA and collusion attacks