skip to main content


Title: Toward Secure, Privacy-Preserving, and Interoperable Medical Data Sharing via Blockchain
In the era of cloud computing and big data analysis, how to efficiently share and utilize medical information scattered across various care providers has become a critical problem. This paper proposes a new framework for sharing medical data in a secure and privacy-preserving way. This framework holistically integrates multi-authority attribute based encryption, blockchain and smart contract, as well as software defined networking to define and enforce sharing policies. Specifically in our framework, patients' medical records are encrypted and stored in hospital databases, where strict access controls are enforced with attribute based encryption coupled with privacy level classification. Our framework leverages blockchain technology to connect scattered private databases from participating hospitals for efficient and secure data provision, smart contracts to enable the business logic of clinical data usage, and software defined networking to revoke sharing privileges. The performance evaluation of our prototype demonstrates that the associated computation costs are reasonable in practice.  more » « less
Award ID(s):
1738965
NSF-PAR ID:
10171469
Author(s) / Creator(s):
; ; ; ; ;
Date Published:
Journal Name:
2019 IEEE 25th International Conference on Parallel and Distributed Systems (ICPADS)
Page Range / eLocation ID:
852 to 861
Format(s):
Medium: X
Sponsoring Org:
National Science Foundation
More Like this
  1. 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. 
    more » « less
  2. The rapid development of three-dimensional (3D) acquisition technology based on 3D sensors provides a large volume of data, which are often represented in the form of point clouds. Point cloud representation can preserve the original geometric information along with associated attributes in a 3D space. Therefore, it has been widely adopted in many scene-understanding-related applications such as virtual reality (VR) and autonomous driving. However, the massive amount of point cloud data aggregated from distributed 3D sensors also poses challenges for secure data collection, management, storage, and sharing. Thanks to the characteristics of decentralization and security, Blockchain has great potential to improve point cloud services and enhance security and privacy preservation. Inspired by the rationales behind the software-defined network (SDN) technology, this paper envisions SAUSA, a Blockchain-based authentication network that is capable of recording, tracking, and auditing the access, usage, and storage of 3D point cloud datasets in their life-cycle in a decentralized manner. SAUSA adopts an SDN-inspired point cloud service architecture, which allows for efficient data processing and delivery to satisfy diverse quality-of-service (QoS) requirements. A Blockchain-based authentication framework is proposed to ensure security and privacy preservation in point cloud data acquisition, storage, and analytics. Leveraging smart contracts for digitizing access control policies and point cloud data on the Blockchain, data owners have full control of their 3D sensors and point clouds. In addition, anyone can verify the authenticity and integrity of point clouds in use without relying on a third party. Moreover, SAUSA integrates a decentralized storage platform to store encrypted point clouds while recording references of raw data on the distributed ledger. Such a hybrid on-chain and off-chain storage strategy not only improves robustness and availability, but also ensures privacy preservation for sensitive information in point cloud applications. A proof-of-concept prototype is implemented and tested on a physical network. The experimental evaluation validates the feasibility and effectiveness of the proposed SAUSA solution. 
    more » « less
  3. The Internet of Things (IoT) is a network of sensors that helps collect data 24/7 without human intervention. However, the network may suffer from problems such as the low battery, heterogeneity, and connectivity issues due to the lack of standards. Even though these problems can cause several performance hiccups, security issues need immediate attention because hackers access vital personal and financial information and then misuse it. These security issues can allow hackers to hijack IoT devices and then use them to establish a Botnet to launch a Distributed Denial of Service (DDoS) attack. Blockchain technology can provide security to IoT devices by providing secure authentication using public keys. Similarly, Smart Contracts (SCs) can improve the performance of the IoT–blockchain network through automation. However, surveyed work shows that the blockchain and SCs do not provide foolproof security; sometimes, attackers defeat these security mechanisms and initiate DDoS attacks. Thus, developers and security software engineers must be aware of different techniques to detect DDoS attacks. In this survey paper, we highlight different techniques to detect DDoS attacks. The novelty of our work is to classify the DDoS detection techniques according to blockchain technology. As a result, researchers can enhance their systems by using blockchain-based support for detecting threats. In addition, we provide general information about the studied systems and their workings. However, we cannot neglect the recent surveys. To that end, we compare the state-of-the-art DDoS surveys based on their data collection techniques and the discussed DDoS attacks on the IoT subsystems. The study of different IoT subsystems tells us that DDoS attacks also impact other computing systems, such as SCs, networking devices, and power grids. Hence, our work briefly describes DDoS attacks and their impacts on the above subsystems and IoT. For instance, due to DDoS attacks, the targeted computing systems suffer delays which cause tremendous financial and utility losses to the subscribers. Hence, we discuss the impacts of DDoS attacks in the context of associated systems. Finally, we discuss Machine-Learning algorithms, performance metrics, and the underlying technology of IoT systems so that the readers can grasp the detection techniques and the attack vectors. Moreover, associated systems such as Software-Defined Networking (SDN) and Field-Programmable Gate Arrays (FPGA) are a source of good security enhancement for IoT Networks. Thus, we include a detailed discussion of future development encompassing all major IoT subsystems. 
    more » « less
  4. We consider the task of interorganizational data sharing, in which data owners, data clients, and data subjects have different and sometimes competing privacy concerns. One real-world scenario in which this problem arises concerns law-enforcement use of phone-call metadata: The data owner is a phone company, the data clients are law-enforcement agencies, and the data subjects are individuals who make phone calls. A key challenge in this type of scenario is that each organization uses its own set of proprietary intraorganizational attributes to describe the shared data; such attributes cannot be shared with other organizations. Moreover, data-access policies are determined by multiple parties and may be specified using attributes that are not directly comparable with the ones used by the owner to specify the data.

    We propose a system architecture and a suite of protocols that facilitate dynamic and efficient interorganizational data sharing, while allowing each party to use its own set of proprietary attributes to describe the shared data and preserving the confidentiality of both data records and proprietary intraorganizational attributes. We introduce the novel technique ofAttribute-Based Encryption with Oblivious Attribute Translation (OTABE), which plays a crucial role in our solution. This extension of attribute-based encryption uses semi-trusted proxies to enable dynamic and oblivious translation between proprietary attributes that belong to different organizations; it supports hidden access policies, direct revocation, and fine-grained, data-centric keys and queries. We prove that our OTABE-based framework is secure in the standard model and provide two real-world use cases.

     
    more » « less
  5. Irfan Awan ; Muhammad Younas ; Jamal Bentahar ; Salima Benbernou (Ed.)
    Multi-site clinical trial systems face security challenges when streamlining information sharing while protecting patient privacy. In addition, patient enrollment, transparency, traceability, data integrity, and reporting in clinical trial systems are all critical aspects of maintaining data compliance. A Blockchain-based clinical trial framework has been proposed by lots of researchers and industrial companies recently, but its limitations of lack of data governance, limited confidentiality, and high communication overhead made data-sharing systems insecure and not efficient. We propose π–²π—ˆπ—π–Ύπ—‹π—‚π–Ί, a privacy-preserving smart contracts framework, to manage, share and analyze clinical trial data on fabric private chaincode (FPC). Compared to public Blockchain, fabric has fewer participants with an efficient consensus protocol. π–²π—ˆπ—π–Ύπ—‹π—‚π–Ί consists of several modules: patient consent and clinical trial approval management chaincode, secure execution for confidential data sharing, API Gateway, and decentralized data governance with adaptive threshold signature (ATS). We implemented two versions of π–²π—ˆπ—π–Ύπ—‹π—‚π–Ί with non-SGX deploys on AWS blockchain and SGX-based on a local data center. We evaluated the response time for all of the access endpoints on AWS Managed Blockchain, and demonstrated the utilization of SGX-based smart contracts for data sharing and analysis. 
    more » « less