The healthcare sector is constantly improving
patient health record systems. However, these systems face a
significant challenge when confronted with patient health record
(PHR) data due to its sensitivity. In addition, patient’s data is
stored and spread generally across various healthcare facilities
and among providers. This arrangement of distributed data
becomes problematic whenever patients want to access their
health records and then share them with their care provider,
which yields a lack of interoperability among various healthcare
systems. Moreover, most patient health record systems adopt a
centralized management structure and deploy PHRs to the cloud,
which raises privacy concerns when sharing patient information
over a network. Therefore, it is vital to design a framework
that considers patient privacy and data security when sharing
sensitive information with healthcare facilities and providers.
This paper proposes a blockchain framework for secured patient
health records sharing that allows patients to have full access and
control over their health records. With this novel approach, our
framework applies the Ethereum blockchain smart contracts,
the Inter-Planetary File System (IPFS) as an off-chain storage
system, and the NuCypher protocol, which functions as key
management and blockchain-based proxy re-encryption to create
a secured on-demand patient health records sharing system
effectively. Results show that the proposed framework is more
secure than other schemes, and the PHRs will not be accessible
to unauthorized providers or users. In addition, all encrypted
data will only be accessible to and readable by verified entities
set by the patient.
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Automating Privacy Compliance Using Policy Integrated Blockchain
An essential requirement of any information management system is to protect data and resources against breach or improper modifications, while at the same time ensuring data access to legitimate users. Systems handling personal data are mandated to track its flow to comply with data protection regulations. We have built a novel framework that integrates semantically rich data privacy knowledge graph with Hyperledger Fabric blockchain technology, to develop an automated access-control and audit mechanism that enforces users' data privacy policies while sharing their data with third parties. Our blockchain based data-sharing solution addresses two of the most critical challenges: transaction verification and permissioned data obfuscation. Our solution ensures accountability for data sharing in the cloud by incorporating a secure and efficient system for End-to-End provenance. In this paper, we describe this framework along with the comprehensive semantically rich knowledge graph that we have developed to capture rules embedded in data privacy policy documents. Our framework can be used by organizations to automate compliance of their Cloud datasets.
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- Award ID(s):
- 1747724
- NSF-PAR ID:
- 10096186
- Date Published:
- Journal Name:
- Cryptography
- Volume:
- 3
- Issue:
- 1
- ISSN:
- 2410-387X
- Page Range / eLocation ID:
- 7
- Format(s):
- Medium: X
- Sponsoring Org:
- National Science Foundation
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- Free Publicly Accessible Full Text
-
Accepted Manuscript1.0
- Journal Article:
- https://doi.org/10.3390/cryptography3010007
