Medchain for Securing Data in Decentralized Healthcare System Using Dynamic Smart Contracts

Priyadarshini, Rojalina; Alagirisamy, Mukil; Rajendran, N.

doi:10.1007/978-3-031-12413-6_45

Cited by 6 publications

(1 citation statement)

References 10 publications

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“…Most studies attempted to develop smart contracts for data storage in a way similar to traditional database systems from two perspectives: (1) structured data are explicitly specified in the smart contract; and (2) users may query the data in the smart contract using a filter for a result directly needed by the users. These studies are predominately in the biomedical and healthcare domain for medical data storage and query [36][37][38]40], and most are winning entries in the 2019 secure genome analysis competition [36,37].…”

Section: Query Flexibility Of Smart-contract-based Datastoresmentioning

confidence: 99%

The Design and Implementation of a Secure Datastore Based on Ethereum Smart Contract

et al. 2023

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In this paper, we present a secure datastore based on an Ethereum smart contract. Our research is guided by three research questions. First, we will explore to what extend a smart-contract-based datastore should resemble a traditional database system. Second, we will investigate how to store the data in a smart-contract-based datastore for maximum flexibility while minimizing the gas consumption. Third, we seek answers regarding whether or not a smart-contract-based datastore should incorporate complex processing such as data encryption and data analytic algorithms. The proposed smart-contract-based datastore aims to strike a good balance between several constraints: (1) smart contracts are publicly visible, which may create a confidentiality concern for the data stored in the datastore; (2) unlike traditional database systems, the Ethereum smart contract programming language (i.e., Solidity) offers very limited data structures for data management; (3) all operations that mutate the blockchain state would incur financial costs and the developers for smart contracts must make sure sufficient gas is provisioned for every smart contract call, and ideally, the gas consumption should be minimized. Our investigation shows that although it is essential for a smart-contract-based datastore to offer some basic data query functionality, it is impractical to offer query flexibility that resembles that of a traditional database system. Furthermore, we propose that data should be structured as tag-value pairs, where the tag serves as a non-unique key that describes the nature of the value. We also conclude that complex processing should not be allowed in the smart contract due to the financial burden and security concerns. The tag-based secure datastore designed this way also defines its applicative perimeter, i.e., only applications that align with our strategy would find the proposed datastore a good fit. Those that would rather incur higher financial cost for more data query flexibility and/or less user burden on data pre- and post-processing would find the proposed database too restrictive.

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