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

A Decentralised Digital Identity Architecture

Current architectures to validate, certify, and manage identity are based on centralised, top-down approaches that rely on trusted authorities and third-party operators. We approach the problem of digital identity starting from a human rights perspective, with a primary focus on identity systems in the developed world. We assert that individual persons must be allowed to manage their personal information in a multitude of different ways in different contexts and that to do so, each individual must be able to create multiple unrelated identities. Therefore, we first define a set of fundamental constraints that digital identity systems must satisfy to preserve and promote privacy as required for individual autonomy. With these constraints in mind, we then propose a decentralised, standards-based approach, using a combination of distributed ledger technology and thoughtful regulation, to facilitate many-to-many relationships among providers of key services. Our proposal for digital identity differs from others in its approach to trust in that we do not seek to bind credentials to each other or to a mutually trusted authority to achieve strong non-transferability. Because the system does not implicitly encourage its users to maintain a single aggregated identity that can potentially be constrained or reconstructed against their interests, individuals and organisations are free to embrace the system and share in its benefits.Comment: 30 pages, 10 figures, 3 table

Is Blockchain for Internet of Medical Things a Panacea for COVID-19 Pandemic?

The outbreak of the COVID-19 pandemic has deeply influenced the lifestyle of the general public and the healthcare system of the society. As a promising approach to address the emerging challenges caused by the epidemic of infectious diseases like COVID-19, Internet of Medical Things (IoMT) deployed in hospitals, clinics, and healthcare centers can save the diagnosis time and improve the efficiency of medical resources though privacy and security concerns of IoMT stall the wide adoption. In order to tackle the privacy, security, and interoperability issues of IoMT, we propose a framework of blockchain-enabled IoMT by introducing blockchain to incumbent IoMT systems. In this paper, we review the benefits of this architecture and illustrate the opportunities brought by blockchain-enabled IoMT. We also provide use cases of blockchain-enabled IoMT on fighting against the COVID-19 pandemic, including the prevention of infectious diseases, location sharing and contact tracing, and the supply chain of injectable medicines. We also outline future work in this area.Comment: 15 pages, 8 figure

A patient agent controlled customized blockchain based framework for internet of things

Although Blockchain implementations have emerged as revolutionary technologies for various industrial applications including cryptocurrencies, they have not been widely deployed to store data streaming from sensors to remote servers in architectures known as Internet of Things. New Blockchain for the Internet of Things models promise secure solutions for eHealth, smart cities, and other applications. These models pave the way for continuous monitoring of patient’s physiological signs with wearable sensors to augment traditional medical practice without recourse to storing data with a trusted authority. However, existing Blockchain algorithms cannot accommodate the huge volumes, security, and privacy requirements of health data. In this thesis, our first contribution is an End-to-End secure eHealth architecture that introduces an intelligent Patient Centric Agent. The Patient Centric Agent executing on dedicated hardware manages the storage and access of streams of sensors generated health data, into a customized Blockchain and other less secure repositories. As IoT devices cannot host Blockchain technology due to their limited memory, power, and computational resources, the Patient Centric Agent coordinates and communicates with a private customized Blockchain on behalf of the wearable devices. While the adoption of a Patient Centric Agent offers solutions for addressing continuous monitoring of patients’ health, dealing with storage, data privacy and network security issues, the architecture is vulnerable to Denial of Services(DoS) and single point of failure attacks. To address this issue, we advance a second contribution; a decentralised eHealth system in which the Patient Centric Agent is replicated at three levels: Sensing Layer, NEAR Processing Layer and FAR Processing Layer. The functionalities of the Patient Centric Agent are customized to manage the tasks of the three levels. Simulations confirm protection of the architecture against DoS attacks. Few patients require all their health data to be stored in Blockchain repositories but instead need to select an appropriate storage medium for each chunk of data by matching their personal needs and preferences with features of candidate storage mediums. Motivated by this context, we advance third contribution; a recommendation model for health data storage that can accommodate patient preferences and make storage decisions rapidly, in real-time, even with streamed data. The mapping between health data features and characteristics of each repository is learned using machine learning. The Blockchain’s capacity to make transactions and store records without central oversight enables its application for IoT networks outside health such as underwater IoT networks where the unattended nature of the nodes threatens their security and privacy. However, underwater IoT differs from ground IoT as acoustics signals are the communication media leading to high propagation delays, high error rates exacerbated by turbulent water currents. Our fourth contribution is a customized Blockchain leveraged framework with the model of Patient-Centric Agent renamed as Smart Agent for securely monitoring underwater IoT. Finally, the smart Agent has been investigated in developing an IoT smart home or cities monitoring framework. The key algorithms underpinning to each contribution have been implemented and analysed using simulators.Doctor of Philosoph

Data interoperability and privacy schemes in healthcare data using Blockchain technology

Abstract. Electronic Health/Medical Records (EHR/EMR) lay the foundation for securely maintaining medical records. The traditional EHR systems are not effectively managed data manipulation, delayed communication, trustless data storage, data cooperation, and distribution. Blockchain technology can play a major role in healthcare cases. This is because it uses decentralized distributed ledgers to securely manage all parties within the network. It also handles individual data through smart contracts, which can be pre-programmed by the patient for access and maintenance of healthcare data. This thesis focuses on exploring the blockchain in digital healthcare services such as Electronic Health/Medical Records (EHR/EMR). Blockchain-based implementations of Ethereum allow patients to store their medical data with smart contracts that can perform activities such as Registration, Data Append, and Data Retrieve. The challenges faced during the implementation of blockchain protocols are discussed and analyzed in the scope of finding sustainable solutions to develop secure and reliable operation