SeFra: A Secure Framework to Manage eHealth Records Using Blockchain Technology

Introduction

Nowadays, most of the industries are moving through a digital transformation journey and technologies like IoT, cloud, and mobility. Digital transformation is applicable for Healthcare system too, but the only problem is trust and security. Sharing the healthcare data in cross-institute is one of the biggest challenging tasks (Cheong, Shin, & Joeng, 2009). Even healthcare data are shared securely, integrity problem is still unchecked, this is will be overcome by the proposed framework. The patient details are very sensitive information, so it’s our responsibility to protect from an unauthorized user. The existing eHealth system facing a lot of privacy and security issues. In the proposed system the sensitive encrypted health is protected over the cloud. In this paper, the authors focus on privacy, integrity, and anonymity. The data privacy means only authorized user can access the healthcare data (Kolodner, Cohn, & Friedman, 2008). The institutional health data is highly confidential and it is an asset to the institution. The anonymity is another way to secure the health record, remove the identical information and share only partial data (Charanya, Aramudhan, Mohan, & Nithya, 2013). Adding privacy in the healthcare system is more important for patient and service provider (Charanya & Aramudhan, 2016). This is achieved by using Blockchain.

Blockchain technology was first introduced by Satoshi Nakamoto in 2008. It’s a new technology used in online cryptocurrency like bitcoin. Blockchain enables trust and transparency due to the peer-to-peer distributed ledger. The Blockchain is a distributed ledger, an endless list of records called blocks. The Cryptography techniques are used to secure the records. By using the hash pointer, each block is linked with the previous block. The two types of blockchain configuration are public and private. Public means its permissionless, anyone can participle in the network, whereas private means its permission, it’s available to the known person. For example, an organization performs 15 transactions per second, each transaction receives its own signature, the digital signature is combined by using a tree structure and form single fingerprint. The fingerprint is sent to the next layer such as a service provider. Once validated its stored in the blockchain, then all users can see, then the copy is sent to the organization to store locally. The main disadvantage of the traditional blockchain, speed, scalability, and storage capacity.

The Blockchain is a distributed public ledger, with a set of rules the transactions get appended, achieved by distributed consensus of participants in the system. Participants can keep track of the transaction in a distributed way, where each participant have the copy of transactions (ledger). The Integrity of data is validated by using Blockchain.

Blockchain technology is used in healthcare to solve healthcare security problems. The encrypted health information is hashed and hashed value is stored in a distributed way, shared by multiple parties that secure all the records. The information is stored in the blockchain. Here each record is added to the previous record, never removed. Each record has own timestamp. All the transactions are encrypted and verified by the network. Keyless Signature Infrastructure blockchain deployed by Estonia government, data scales to 10¹² items of data every second.

The existing work drawback is overcome by our proposed system. According to Provchain, the user has to pay fees to get provenance service and also pay for blockchain network also it’s not supporting federated cloud. The BSPP protocol secures the eHealth system also it allows the authorized doctor to access the patient health record and it’s not supporting the conjunctive keyword search, also planning to propose specific miner and verification election algorithm. The entire drawback is overcome by the proposed SeFra framework.