Designing a Private and Secure Personal Health Records Access Management System: A Solution Based on IOTA Distributed Ledger Technology

Abstract

The privacy and security of patients’ health records have been an ongoing issue, and researchers are in a race against technology to design a system that can help stop the compromising of patient data. Many researchers have proposed solutions; however, most solutions have not incorporated potential parameters that can ensure private and secure personal health records management, which is the focus of this study. To design and develop a solution, this research thoroughly investigated existing solutions and identified potential key contexts. These include IOTA Tangle, Distributed Ledger Technology (DLT), IPFS protocols, Application Programming Interface (API), Proxy Re-encryption (PRE), and access control, which are analysed and integrated to secure patient medical records, and Internet of Things (IoT) medical devices, to develop a patient-based access management system that gives patients full control of their health records. This research developed four prototype applications to demonstrate the proposed solution: the web appointment application, the patient application, the doctor application, and the remote medical IoT device application. The results indicate that the proposed framework can improve healthcare services by providing immutable, secure, scalable, trusted, self-managed, and traceable patient health records while giving patients full control of their own medical records.

PUFchain 3.0: Hardware-Assisted Distributed Ledger for Robust Authentication in Healthcare Cyber–Physical Systems

“…SbD of H-CPS is a focus area for many researchers since privacy and security issues have direct implications on the patient's life. A smart, remote patient-monitoring system using IOTA is presented in [24]. The research proposed and validated an IOTA MAMbased approach for patient data access control and security.…”

“…All the transactions in Tangle are part of the directed acyclic graph (DAG) structure. The major advantage of this structure is that it increases the transaction validation rate exponentially when compared with the traditional blockchain structure that has all the transactions aligned sequentially [24]. Every new transaction on Tangle from a node validates the unconfirmed transactions called "Tips" to become part of the structure.…”

“…The message can be accessed by the receiver using the channel's address, and whenever a new message of any length and size is uploaded on Tangle, a channel is created, and the receivers can immediately access the data using the root of the MHT. MAM operates in three different communication modes: public, private, and restricted [24].…”

Security-enhanced firmware management scheme for smart home IoT devices using distributed ledger technologies

“…An IoT gateway for secure firmware verification and updating for devices can be managed utilizing the IOTA Masked Authenticated Messaging (MAM). Additionally, IOTA's DAG, or in other words, "The Tangle", is a tamper-resistant and permission-less data repository [3,[46][47][48]. In contrast to the high cost for storing large files on Blockchain, storage of large files in DAG-based decentralized architecture is assured through the Inter-Planetary File System (IPFS) [29,49,50].…”