A Blockchain-based Secure and Privacy-Preserving Healthcare Data Management Framework with SHA-256 and PoW Consensus

Geng Niu

Abstract


Healthcare systems handle a vast amount of sensitive patient data, making privacy and security crucial concerns. As digital health technologies expand, ensuring accurate and secure data storage becomes increasingly important. However, the frequent exchange of medical information poses risks of unauthorized access and data breaches, complicating secure data sharing. Moreover, many blockchain-based healthcare solutions face challenges related to performance inefficiencies and insufficient privacy safeguards. To overcome these limitations, we introduce a blockchain-powered system designed to enhance privacy protection, secure data sharing, and reliable storage in healthcare environments. Our methodology integrates an access control mechanism using SHA-256 for data integrity, RSA and ECDSA for transaction signatures, and a Proof-of-Work (PoW) consensus mechanism to ensure decentralized trust and scalability. The system employs cryptographic key management with RSA-generated public-private key pairs to secure data access and prevent unauthorized modifications. Experimental results demonstrate that the proposed system achieves an average transaction latency of 15.3 ms for 10 transactions on a single node, with a data integrity success rate of 100% across all tested scenarios. Comparative evaluations against state-of-theart frameworks show our system reduces latency by 39% while maintaining robust security. Additionally, performance analysis highlights the system’s ability to maintain low computational overhead, with transaction times ranging from 25.2 ms to 157.4 ms for 1 to 15 transactions across multiple nodes, ensuring efficient processing in real-world healthcare settings.


Full Text:

PDF

References


M. Pourvahab and G. Ekbatanifard, “An efficient forensics architecture in software-defined networking-IoT using blockchain technology,” *IEEE Access*, vol. 7, pp. 99573–99588, 2019.

R. Mishra, R. Yadav, and P. Nath, “Integration of blockchain and IPFS: Healthcare data management & sharing for IoT environment,” *Multimedia Tools and Applications*, 2024.

S. Kim, “Two-phase cooperative bargaining game approach for shard-based blockchain consensus scheme,” *IEEE Access*, vol. 7, pp. 127772–127780, 2019.

R. Srivastava and D. Prashar, “A secure blockchain enabled approach for e-health-care system,” in *2021 International Conference on Computing Sciences (ICCS)*, pp. 194–201, IEEE, 2021.

M. H. Kumar, V. Mohanraj, Y. Suresh, J. Senthilkumar, and G. Nagalalli, “Real time two hop neighbour strategic secure routing with attribute specific blockchain encryption scheme for improved security in wireless sensor networks,” *Int. J. Comput. Networks Appl.*, vol. 8, no. 4, pp. 300–310, 2021.

M. Al-Zubaidie and R. Razzaq, “Maintaining security of patient data by employing private blockchain and fog computing technologies based on internet of medical things,” *Informatica*, 2024.

M. Alshare, K. Abuhmaidan, F. Ahmed, and A. Abualkishik, “Assessing blockchain’s role in healthcare security: A comprehensive review,” *Informatica*, 2024.

R. Khemaissia, M. Derdour, M. Ferrag, and M. Bouhamed, “Prschain: A blockchain-based privacy preserving approach for data service composition,” *Informatica*, 2023.

I. Boumezbeur and K. Zarour, “Privacy-preserving and access control for sharing electronic health record using blockchain technology,” *Acta Informatica Pragensia*, 2022.

M. Islam, M. Ameedeen, M. Rahman, H. Ajra, and Z. Ismail, “Healthcare-chain: Blockchain-enabled decentralized trustworthy system in healthcare management industry 4.0 with cybersafeguard,” *Computers*, MDPI, vol. 12, no. 2, p. 46, 2023.

M. Rahman, M. Abuludin, L. Yuan, M. Islam, and A. Asyhari, “Educhain: CIA-compliant blockchain for intelligent cyber defense of microservices in education industry 4.0,” *IEEE Transactions on Industrial Informatics*, vol. 18, no. 3, pp. 1930–1938, 2021.

A. Khatoon, “A blockchain-based smart contract system for healthcare management,” *Electron.*, vol. 9, no. 1, 2020.

G. Yang and C. Li, “A design of blockchain-based architecture for the security of electronic health record (EHR) systems,” in *Proc. Int. Conf. Cloud Comput. Technol. Sci. CloudCom*, vol. 2018-December, pp. 261–265, 2018.

M. Bowman, A. Miele, M. Steiner, and B. Vavala, “Private data objects: An overview,” *arXiv preprint*, vol. arXiv:1807.05686, 2018.

R. C. et al., “Ekiden: A platform for confidentiality-preserving, trustworthy, and performant smart contracts,” in *Proc. - 4th IEEE Eur. Symp. Secur. Privacy, EURO S P 2019*, pp. 185–200, 2019.

S. Kushch, S. Ranise, and G. Sciarretta, “Blockchain tree for eHealth,” in *2019 IEEE Glob. Conf. Internet Things, GCIoT 2019*, pp. 1–5, IEEE, 2019.

T. Saba, K. Haseeb, I. Ahmed, and A. Rehman, “Secure and energy-efficient framework using internet of medical things for e-healthcare,” *J. Infect. Public Health*, vol. 13, no. 10, pp. 1567–1575, 2020.

A. Sharma, Sarishma, R. Tomar, N. Chilamkurti, and B. G. Kim, “Blockchain based smart contracts for internet of medical things in e-healthcare,” *Electron.*, vol. 9, no. 10, pp. 1–14, 2020.

M. P. D’Arienzo, A. N. Dudin, S. A. Dudin, and R. Manzo, “Analysis of a retrial queue with group service of impatient customers,” *J. Ambient Intell. Humaniz. Comput.*, vol. 11, no. 6, pp. 2591–2599, 2020.

X. Yu, Y. an Tan, Z. Sun, J. Liu, C. Liang, and Q. Zhang, “A fault-tolerant and energy-efficient continuous data protection system,” *J. Ambient Intell. Humaniz. Comput.*, vol. 10, no. 8, pp. 2945–2954, 2019.

P. Z. et al., “Optrak: Tracking opioid prescriptions via distributed ledger technology,” *Int. J. Inf. Syst. Soc. Chang.*, vol. 10, no. 2, pp. 45–61, 2019.

K. Fan, S. Zhu, K. Zhang, H. Li, and Y. Yang, “A lightweight authentication scheme for cloud-based RFID healthcare systems,” *IEEE Netw.*, vol. 33, no. 2, pp. 44–49, 2019.

Y. L. et al., “A novel cloud-based framework for the elderly healthcare services using digital twin,” *IEEE Access*, vol. 7, pp. 49088–49101, 2019.

Z. Ying, L. Wei, Q. Li, X. Liu, and J. Cui, “A lightweight policy preserving EHR sharing scheme in the cloud,” *IEEE Access*, vol. 6, pp. 53698–53708, 2018.

H. Wang and Y. Song, “Secure cloud-based EHR system using attribute-based cryptosystem and blockchain,” *Journal of Medical Systems*, vol. 42, no. 8, p. 152, 2018.

A. R. Lee, M. G. Kim, and I. K. Kim, “Sharechain: Healthcare data sharing framework using blockchain-registry and FHIR,” in *Proc. - 2019 IEEE Int. Conf. Bioinforma. Biomed. BIBM 2019*, pp. 1087–1090, 2019.

C. D. Parameswari and V. Mandadi, “Healthcare data protection based on blockchain using Solidity,” in *Fourth World Conference on Smart Trends in Systems Security and Sustainability (WorldS4)*, pp. 577–580, IEEE, 2020.

N. A. Asad, M. T. Elahi, A. A. Hasan, and M. A. Yousuf, “Permission-based blockchain with proof of authority for secured healthcare data sharing,” in *2020 2nd International Conference on Advanced Information and Communication Technology (ICAICT)*, pp. 35–40, IEEE, 2020.

V. Ramani, T. Kumar, A. Bracken, M. Liyanage, and M. Ylianttila, “Secure and efficient data accessibility in blockchain based healthcare systems,” in *2018 IEEE Glob. Commun. Conf. GLOBECOM 2018 - Proc.*, 2018.




DOI: https://doi.org/10.31449/inf.v49i20.8392

Creative Commons License
This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 3.0 License.