In recent years, many researchers have focused on developing a feasible solution for storing and exchanging medical images in the field of health care. Current practices are deployed on cloud-based centralized data centers, which increase maintenance costs, require massive storage space, and raise privacy concerns about sharing information over a network. Therefore, it is important to design a framework to enable sharing and storing of big medical data efficiently within a trustless environment. In the present paper, we propose a novel proof-of-concept design for a distributed patient-centric image management (PCIM) system that is aimed to ensure safety and control of patient private data without using a centralized infrastructure. In this system, we employed an emerging Ethereum blockchain and a distributed file system technology called InterPlanetary File System (IPFS). Then, we implemented an Ethereum smart contract called the patientcentric access control protocol to enable a distributed and trustworthy access control policy. IPFS provides the means for decentralized storage of medical images with global accessibility. We describe how the PCIM system architecture facilitates the distributed and secured patient-centric data access across multiple entities such as hospitals, patients, and image requestors. Finally, we deployed a smart contract prototype on an Ethereum testnet blockchain and evaluated the proposed framework within the Windows environment. The evaluation results demonstrated that the proposed scheme is efficient and feasible.
We present a mechanism that puts users in the center of control and empowers them to dictate the access to their collections of data. Revisiting the fundamental mechanisms in security for providing protection, our solution uses capabilities, access lists, and access rights following well-understood formal notions for reasoning about access. This contribution presents a practical, correct, auditable, transparent, distributed, and decentralized mechanism that is well-matched to the current emerging environments including Internet of Things, smart city, precision medicine, and autonomous cars. It…
Today there is considerable interest in deploying blockchains and decentralized ledger technology as a means to address the deficiencies of current financial and digital asset infrastructures. The focal point of attention in many projects on digital asset and cryptocurrency is centered around blockchain systems and smart contracts. Many projects seek to make the blockchain as the centerpiece of the new decentralized world of finance. However, several roadblocks and challenges currently face this predominant blockchain-centric view. In this paper we argue that the proper and correct perspective…
We present an identity management scheme built into the Bitcoin blockchain, allowing for identities that are as indelible as the blockchain itself. Moreover, we take advantage of Bitcoin's decentralized nature to facilitate a shared control between users and identity providers, allowing users to directly manage their own identities, fluidly coordinating identities from different providers, even as identity providers can revoke identities and impose controls.
In this article, the authors provide a comprehensive overview on three core pillars of metaverse-as-a-service (MaaS) platforms; privacy and security, edge computing, and blockchain technology. The article starts by investigating security aspects for the wireless access to the metaverse. Then it goes through the privacy and security issues inside the metaverse from data-centric, learning-centric, and human-centric points-of-view. The authors address private and secure mechanisms for privatizing sensitive data attributes and securing machine learning algorithms running in a distributed manner wi…
Technology has evolved over the years, making our lives easier. It has impacted the healthcare sector, increasing the average life expectancy of human beings. Still, there are gaps that remain unaddressed. There is a lack of transparency in the healthcare system, which results in inherent trust problems between patients and hospitals. In the present day, a patient does not know whether he or she will get the proper treatment from the hospital for the fee charged. A patient can claim reimbursement of the medical bill from any insurance company. However, today there is minimal scope for the Insu…
Fault tolerance of a blockchain is often characterized by the fraction $f$ of "adversarial power" that it can tolerate in the system. Despite the fast progress in blockchain designs in recent years, existing blockchain systems can still only tolerate $f$ below $0.5$. Can practically usable blockchains tolerate a malicious majority, i.e., $f$ above $0.5$? This work presents a positive answer to this question. We first note that the well-known impossibility of {\em byzantine consensus} for $f$ above $0.5$ does not carry over to blockchains. To tolerate $f$ above $0.5$, we use {\em byzantine broa…
The revolution of Internet of Things (IoT) devices and wearable technology has opened up great possibilities in remote patient monitoring. To streamline the diagnosis and treatment process, healthcare professionals are now adopting the wearable technology. However, these technologies also pose grave privacy risks and security concerns about the transfer and the logging of data transactions. One solution to protect privacy in healthcare is the use of blockchain technology. However, one of the primary problems with blockchain is its highly limited scalability. In this work here, we propose the u…
In this paper, we propose a trust-centric privacy-preserving blockchain for dynamic spectrum access in IoT networks. To be specific, we propose a trust evaluation mechanism to evaluate the trustworthiness of sensing nodes and design a Proof-of-Trust (PoT) consensus mechanism to build a scalable blockchain with high transaction-per-second (TPS). Moreover, a privacy protection scheme is proposed to protect sensors' real-time geolocatioin information when they upload sensing data to the blockchain. Two smart contracts are designed to make the whole procedure (spectrum sensing, spectrum auction, a…
Medical data sharing needs to be done with the utmost respect for privacy and security. It contains intimate data of the patient and any access to it must be highly regulated. With the emergence of vertical solutions in healthcare institutions, interoperability across organisations has been hindered. The authors of this paper propose a blockchain based medical-data sharing solution, utilising Hyperledger Fabric to regulate access to medical data, and using the InterPlanatory File System for its storage. We believe that the combination of these two distributed solutions can enable patients to a…
IoT has enabled the rapid growth of smart remote healthcare applications. These IoT-based remote healthcare applications deliver fast and preventive medical services to patients at risk or with chronic diseases. However, ensuring data security and patient privacy while exchanging sensitive medical data among medical IoT devices is still a significant concern in remote healthcare applications. Altered or corrupted medical data may cause wrong treatment and create grave health issues for patients. Moreover, current remote medical applications' efficiency and response time need to be addressed an…
The design of access control mechanisms for healthcare systems is challenging: it must strike the right balance between permissions and restrictions. In this work, we propose a novel approach that is based on the Blockchain technology for storage patient medical data and create an audit logging system able to protect health data from unauthorized modification and access. The proposed method consists of a tree structure: a main chain linked with the patient's identity and one or several Subchains which are used for storing additional critical data (e.g., medical diagnoses or access logs).
Electronic Health Records(EHR) are gaining a lot of popularity all over the world. The current EHR systems however have their fair share of problems related to privacy and security. We have proposed a mechanism which provides a solution to most of these problems. Using a permissioned Ethereum blockchain allows the hospitals and patients across the world to be connected to each other. Our mechanism uses a combination of symmetric and asymmetric key cryptography to ensure the secure storage and selective access of records. It gives patients full control over their health records and also allows …
Traditional data collection, storage and processing of Electronic Health Records (EHR) utilize centralized techniques that pose several risks of single point of failure and lean the systems to a number of internal and external data breaches that compromise their reliability and availability. Blockchain is an emerging distributed technology that can solve these issues due to its immutability and architectural nature that prevent records manipulation or alterations. In this paper, we discuss the progress and opportunities of remote patient monitoring using futuristic blockchain technologies and …
The development of eHealth systems has brought great convenience to people's life. Researchers have been combining new technologies to make eHealth systems work better for patients. The Blockchain-based eHealth system becomes popular because of its unique distributed tamper-resistant and privacy-preserving features. However, due to the security issues of the blockchain system, there are many security risks in eHealth systems utilizing the blockchain technology. i.e. 51% attacks can destroy blockchain-based systems. Besides, trivial transactions and frequent calls of smart contracts in the bloc…
Machine learning abilities have become a vital component for various solutions across industries, applications, and sectors. Many organizations seek to leverage AI-based solutions across their business services to unlock better efficiency and increase productivity. Problems, however, can arise if there is a lack of quality data for AI-model training, scalability, and maintenance. We propose a data-centric federated learning architecture leveraged by a public blockchain and smart contracts to overcome this significant issue. Our proposed solution provides a virtual public marketplace where deve…
The digital transformation of the medical sector requires solutions that are convenient and efficient for all stakeholders while protecting patients' sensitive data. One example that has already attracted design-oriented research are medical prescriptions. However, current implementations of electronic prescription management systems typically create centralized data silos, leaving user data vulnerable to cybersecurity incidents and impeding interoperability. Research has also proposed decentralized solutions based on blockchain technology, but privacy-related challenges have often been ignore…
Electronic medical record (EMR) is a crucial form of healthcare data, currently drawing a lot of attention. Sharing health data is considered to be a critical approach to improve the quality of healthcare service and reduce medical costs. However, EMRs are fragmented across decentralized hospitals, which hinders data sharing and puts patients' privacy at risks. To address these issues, we propose a blockchain based privacy-preserving data sharing for EMRs, called BPDS. In BPDS, the original EMRs are stored securely in the cloud and the indexes are reserved in a tamper-proof consortium blockcha…
Real-world applications in healthcare and supply chain domains produce, exchange, and share data in a multi-stakeholder environment. Data owners want to control their data and privacy in such settings. On the other hand, data consumers demand methods to understand when, how, and who produced the data. These requirements necessitate data governance frameworks that guarantee data provenance, privacy protection, and consent management. We introduce a decentralized data governance framework based on blockchain technology and proxy re-encryption to let data owners control and track their data throu…
The Internet of Medical Things (IoMT) offers an infrastructure made of smart medical equipment and software applications for health services. Through the internet, the IoMT is capable of providing remote medical diagnosis and timely health services. The patients can use their smart devices to create, store and share their electronic health records (EHR) with a variety of medical personnel including medical doctors and nurses. However, unless the underlying combination within IoMT is secured, malicious users can intercept, modify and even delete the sensitive EHR data of patients. Patients also…
Integration of Federated Learning and Blockchain in Healthcare: A Tutorial
Montreal Blockchain Lab, University of Montreal（蒙特利尔区块链实验室，蒙特利尔大学）；School of Electrical Engineering and Computer Science, University of Ottawa（渥太华大学电气与计算机工程学院）
IoMT-Blockchain based Secured Remote Patient Monitoring Framework for Neuro-Stimulation Device
School of Management Science and Engineering, Shandong University of Finance and Economics（山东财经大学管理科学与工程学院）；College of Computer Science and Software Engineering, Shenzhen University（深圳大学计算机与软件学院）；Bangladesh Atomic Energy Regulatory Authority（孟加拉国原子能监管局）；School of Computer Science and Technology, Northumbria University（诺森比亚大学计算机科学与技术学院）；American International University, Bangladesh（孟加拉国美国国际大学）
Current systems used by medical institutions for the management and transfer of Electronic Medical Records (EMR) can be vulnerable to security and privacy threats. In addition, these centralized systems often lack interoperability and give patients limited or no access to their own EMRs. In this paper, we propose a novel distributed data sharing scheme that applies the security benefits of blockchain to handle these concerns. With blockchain, we incorporate smart contracts and a distributed storage system to alleviate the dependence on the record-generating institutions to manage and share pat…
Cross-institutional healthcare predictive modeling can accelerate research and facilitate quality improvement initiatives, and thus is important for national healthcare delivery priorities. For example, a model that predicts risk of re-admission for a particular set of patients will be more generalizable if developed with data from multiple institutions. While privacy-protecting methods to build predictive models exist, most are based on a centralized architecture, which presents security and robustness vulnerabilities such as single-point-of-failure (and single-point-of-breach) and accidental…
Self-Sovereign Identity (SSI), a Blockchain-based technology for digital identity management, is a promising concept for handling health data. It could represent a step forward in empowering users, granting them control over their data. This work conducts a systematic literature review to investigate state-of-the-art measures based on SSI and Blockchain technologies for dealing with electronic health records (EHRs), identifying gaps, and determining the key questions for future research. As a result, this review shows a growing interest in Blockchain methods to handle EHRs, but few works consi…
The transparent and decentralized characteristics associated with blockchain can be both appealing and problematic when applied to a healthcare use-case. As health data is highly sensitive, it is also highly regulated to ensure the privacy of patients. At the same time, access to health data and interoperability is in high demand. Regulatory frameworks such as GDPR and HIPAA are, amongst other objectives, meant to contribute to mitigating the risk of privacy violations in health data. Blockchain features can likely improve interoperability and access control to health data, and at the same tim…
The application of blockchain technology can be beneficial in the field of healthcare as well as in the fight against the COVID-19 epidemic. In this work, the importance of blockchain is analyzed and it is observed that blockchain technology and the processes associated with it will be utilised in the healthcare systems of the future for data acquisition from sensors, automatic patient monitoring, and secure data storage. This technology substantially simplifies the process of carrying out operations because it can store a substantial quantity of data in a dispersed and secure manner, as well …
The global Electronic Health Record (EHR) market is growing dramatically and has already hit $31.5 billion in 2018. To safeguard the security of EHR data and privacy of patients, fine-grained information access and sharing mechanisms are essential for EHR management. This paper proposes a hybrid architecture of blockchain and edge nodes to facilitate EHR management. In this architecture, we utilize attribute-based multi-signature (ABMS) scheme to authenticate user's signatures without revealing the sensitive information and multi-authority attribute-based encryption (ABE) scheme to encrypt EHR…
