Medical Data Sharing Scheme Based on Attribute Cryptosystem and Blockchain Technology

Abstract

Electronic medical data have significant advantages over paper-based patient records when it comes to storage and retrieval. However, most existing medical data sharing schemes have security risks, such as being prone to data tampering and forgery, and do not support the ability to verify the authenticity of the data source. To solve these problems, we propose a medical data sharing scheme based on attribute cryptosystem and blockchain technology in this paper. First, the encrypted medical data are stored in the cloud, and the storage address and medical-related information are written into the blockchain, which can ensure efficient storage and eliminate the possibility of irreversible modification of the data. Second, the proposed scheme combines attribute-based encryption (ABE) and attribute-based signature (ABS), which achieves the sharing of medical data in many-to-many communications. The ABE achieves data privacy and fine-grained access control, and the ABS verifies the authenticity of the source of the medical data while protecting the signer's identity. Moreover, the data user outsources most of the operations of medical data ciphertext decryption to the cloud service provider (CSP), which can greatly reduce the computational burden. Finally, results of the analysis show that our scheme satisfies the requirements for confidentiality and unforgeability in the random oracle model, and that the proposed scheme offers higher computational performance than other similar schemes. INDEX TERMS Attribute-based cryptosystem, blockchain, confidentiality, electronic medical data, unforgeability.

TABE-DAC: Efficient Traceable Attribute-Based Encryption Scheme With Dynamic Access Control Based on Blockchain

“…Some solutions for data privacy protections have been proposed by leveraging the decentralized and immutability features of blockchain technology [29], [30]. Zyskind et al [31] proposed a personal data management system by using blockchain.…”

Design of Secure Authentication Protocol for Cloud-Assisted Telecare Medical Information System Using Blockchain

“…Wang and Song utilized IDbased cryptosystem and attribute-based cryptosystem for the medical data integrity and confidentiality. Yang et al [32] utilized decentralized attribute-based signature and outsourced decryption ABE to improve the efficiency of the scheme presented in [31]. Their scheme consumes less computation cost compared to the scheme presented in the scheme [31].…”

“…Their scheme consumes less computation cost compared to the scheme presented in the scheme [31]. However, these schemes [29], [30], [31], [32] do not deal with the mutual authentication and session key agreement process.…”

A Blockchain-Assisted Verifiable Outsourced Attribute-Based Signcryption Scheme for EHRs Sharing in the Cloud

“…However, this scheme incurs a lot of computational overhead for users. On the basis of [52], Yang et al [53] introduced an attribute-based outsourcing decryption mechanism, which greatly reduces the users' computational overhead. In addition, the use of ABE and AB-S improves the computational efficiency of the EHRs system.…”

“…Scheme [54] combines the ABSC with blockchain technology to realize the secure sharing of cloud data. Compared with the "encryption then signature" adopted by Yang et al [53], there are higher savings in computing overhead and communication costs. However, the computational cost of data encryption and authentication still needs to be improved.…”