scholarly journals Blockchain Technology: Is It a Good Candidate for Securing IoT Sensitive Medical Data?

2018 ◽  
Vol 2018 ◽  
pp. 1-11 ◽  
Author(s):  
Nabil Rifi ◽  
Nazim Agoulmine ◽  
Nada Chendeb Taher ◽  
Elie Rachkidi

In the past few years, the number of wireless devices connected to the Internet has increased to a number that could reach billions in the next few years. While cloud computing is being seen as the solution to process this data, security challenges could not be addressed solely with this technology. Security problems will continue to increase with such a model, especially for private and sensitive data such as personal data and medical data collected with more and more smarter connected devices constituting the so called Internet of Things. As a consequence, there is an urgent need for a fully decentralized peer-to-peer and secure technology solution to overcome these problems. The blockchain technology is a promising just-in-time solution that brings the required properties to the field. However, there are still challenges to address before using it in the context of IoT. This paper discusses these challenges and proposes a secure IoT architecture for medical data based on blockchain technology. The solution introduces a protocol for data access, smart contracts and a publisher-subscriber mechanism for notification. A simple analytical model is also presented to highlight the performance of the system. An implementation of the solution as a proof of concept is also presented.

2014 ◽  
Vol 8 (2) ◽  
pp. 13-24 ◽  
Author(s):  
Arkadiusz Liber

Introduction: Medical documentation ought to be accessible with the preservation of its integrity as well as the protection of personal data. One of the manners of its protection against disclosure is anonymization. Contemporary methods ensure anonymity without the possibility of sensitive data access control. it seems that the future of sensitive data processing systems belongs to the personalized method. In the first part of the paper k-Anonymity, (X,y)- Anonymity, (α,k)- Anonymity, and (k,e)-Anonymity methods were discussed. these methods belong to well - known elementary methods which are the subject of a significant number of publications. As the source papers to this part, Samarati, Sweeney, wang, wong and zhang’s works were accredited. the selection of these publications is justified by their wider research review work led, for instance, by Fung, Wang, Fu and y. however, it should be noted that the methods of anonymization derive from the methods of statistical databases protection from the 70s of 20th century. Due to the interrelated content and literature references the first and the second part of this article constitute the integral whole.Aim of the study: The analysis of the methods of anonymization, the analysis of the methods of protection of anonymized data, the study of a new security type of privacy enabling device to control disclosing sensitive data by the entity which this data concerns.Material and methods: Analytical methods, algebraic methods.Results: Delivering material supporting the choice and analysis of the ways of anonymization of medical data, developing a new privacy protection solution enabling the control of sensitive data by entities which this data concerns.Conclusions: In the paper the analysis of solutions for data anonymization, to ensure privacy protection in medical data sets, was conducted. the methods of: k-Anonymity, (X,y)- Anonymity, (α,k)- Anonymity, (k,e)-Anonymity, (X,y)-Privacy, lKc-Privacy, l-Diversity, (X,y)-linkability, t-closeness, confidence Bounding and Personalized Privacy were described, explained and analyzed. The analysis of solutions of controlling sensitive data by their owner was also conducted. Apart from the existing methods of the anonymization, the analysis of methods of the protection of anonymized data was included. In particular, the methods of: δ-Presence, e-Differential Privacy, (d,γ)-Privacy, (α,β)-Distributing Privacy and protections against (c,t)-isolation were analyzed. Moreover, the author introduced a new solution of the controlled protection of privacy. the solution is based on marking a protected field and the multi-key encryption of sensitive value. The suggested way of marking the fields is in accordance with Xmlstandard. For the encryption, (n,p) different keys cipher was selected. to decipher the content the p keys of n were used. The proposed solution enables to apply brand new methods to control privacy of disclosing sensitive data.


2016 ◽  
pp. 1756-1773
Author(s):  
Grzegorz Spyra ◽  
William J. Buchanan ◽  
Peter Cruickshank ◽  
Elias Ekonomou

This paper proposes a new identity, and its underlying meta-data, model. The approach enables secure spanning of identity meta-data across many boundaries such as health-care, financial and educational institutions, including all others that store and process sensitive personal data. It introduces the new concepts of Compound Personal Record (CPR) and Compound Identifiable Data (CID) ontology, which aim to move toward own your own data model. The CID model ensures authenticity of identity meta-data; high availability via unified Cloud-hosted XML data structure; and privacy through encryption, obfuscation and anonymity applied to Ontology-based XML distributed content. Additionally CID via XML ontologies is enabled for identity federation. The paper also suggests that access over sensitive data should be strictly governed through an access control model with granular policy enforcement on the service side. This includes the involvement of relevant access control model entities, which are enabled to authorize an ad-hoc break-glass data access, which should give high accountability for data access attempts.


Cryptography ◽  
2019 ◽  
Vol 3 (1) ◽  
pp. 7 ◽  
Author(s):  
Karuna Pande Joshi ◽  
Agniva Banerjee

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.


10.2196/17475 ◽  
2021 ◽  
Vol 23 (8) ◽  
pp. e17475
Author(s):  
Konstantin Koshechkin ◽  
Georgy Lebedev ◽  
George Radzievsky ◽  
Ralf Seepold ◽  
Natividad Madrid Martinez

Background One of the most promising health care development areas is introducing telemedicine services and creating solutions based on blockchain technology. The study of systems combining both these domains indicates the ongoing expansion of digital technologies in this market segment. Objective This paper aims to review the feasibility of blockchain technology for telemedicine. Methods The authors identified relevant studies via systematic searches of databases including PubMed, Scopus, Web of Science, IEEE Xplore, and Google Scholar. The suitability of each for inclusion in this review was assessed independently. Owing to the lack of publications, available blockchain-based tokens were discovered via conventional web search engines (Google, Yahoo, and Yandex). Results Of the 40 discovered projects, only 18 met the selection criteria. The 5 most prevalent features of the available solutions (N=18) were medical data access (14/18, 78%), medical service processing (14/18, 78%), diagnostic support (10/18, 56%), payment transactions (10/18, 56%), and fundraising for telemedical instrument development (5/18, 28%). Conclusions These different features (eg, medical data access, medical service processing, epidemiology reporting, diagnostic support, and treatment support) allow us to discuss the possibilities for integration of blockchain technology into telemedicine and health care on different levels. In this area, a wide range of tasks can be identified that could be accomplished based on digital technologies using blockchains.


The purpose of this paper is to explore the applications of blockchain in the healthcare industry. Healthcare sector can become an application domain of blockchain as it can be used to securely store health records and maintain an immutable version of truth. Blockchain technology is originally built on Hyperledger, which is a decentralized platform to enable secure, unambiguous and swift transactions and usage of medical records for various purposes. The paper proposes to use blockchain technology to provide a common and secured platform through which medical data can be accessed by doctors, medical practitioners, pharma and insurance companies. In order to provide secured access to such sensitive data, blockchain ensures that any organization or person can only access data with consent of the patient. The Hyperledger Fabric architecture guarantees that the data is safe and private by permitting the patients to grant multi-level access to their data. Apart from blockchain technology, machine learning can be used in the healthcare sector to understand and analyze patterns and gain insights from data. As blockchain can be used to provide secured and authenticated data, machine learning can be used to analyze the provided data and establish new boundaries by applying various machine learning techniques on such real-time medical data.


2021 ◽  
Author(s):  
HariPriya K ◽  
Brintha NC ◽  
Yogesh C K

Security is a major concern in every technology that is introduced newly to facilitate the existing mechanism for better maintenance and handling. This is also the case in electronic health records. The data of the hospitals and the associated patients gets digital in the past few decades. The data is stored in the cloud for various reasons such as convenience of the participating entities to access it, easy maintenance. But, with this there also arises various security concerns. It has been observed from the reason studies that blockchain is used as the means of securing the healthcare data in the cloud environment.This study discusses the following. 1) Applications of blockchain in cloud environment, 2) Applications of blockchain in securing healthcare data 3) General issues and security concerns in blockchain technology and what features of block chain makes it suitable for securing health care a nd what features restricts it from using.This work helps the future researchers in getting a deep understanding of the in and out of applying blockchain in cloud and healthcare environment.


2019 ◽  
Author(s):  
Konstantin Koshechkin ◽  
Georgy Lebedev ◽  
George Radzievsky ◽  
Ralf Seepold ◽  
Natividad Madrid Martinez

BACKGROUND One of the most promising health care development areas is introducing telemedicine services and creating solutions based on blockchain technology. The study of systems combining both these domains indicates the ongoing expansion of digital technologies in this market segment. OBJECTIVE This paper aims to review the feasibility of blockchain technology for telemedicine. METHODS The authors identified relevant studies via systematic searches of databases including PubMed, Scopus, Web of Science, IEEE Xplore, and Google Scholar. The suitability of each for inclusion in this review was assessed independently. Owing to the lack of publications, available blockchain-based tokens were discovered via conventional web search engines (Google, Yahoo, and Yandex). RESULTS Of the 40 discovered projects, only 18 met the selection criteria. The 5 most prevalent features of the available solutions (N=18) were medical data access (14/18, 78%), medical service processing (14/18, 78%), diagnostic support (10/18, 56%), payment transactions (10/18, 56%), and fundraising for telemedical instrument development (5/18, 28%). CONCLUSIONS These different features (eg, medical data access, medical service processing, epidemiology reporting, diagnostic support, and treatment support) allow us to discuss the possibilities for integration of blockchain technology into telemedicine and health care on different levels. In this area, a wide range of tasks can be identified that could be accomplished based on digital technologies using blockchains.


2014 ◽  
Vol 3 (1) ◽  
pp. 49-66 ◽  
Author(s):  
Grzegorz Spyra ◽  
William J Buchanan ◽  
Peter Cruickshank ◽  
Elias Ekonomou

This paper proposes a new identity, and its underlying meta-data, model. The approach enables secure spanning of identity meta-data across many boundaries such as health-care, financial and educational institutions, including all others that store and process sensitive personal data. It introduces the new concepts of Compound Personal Record (CPR) and Compound Identifiable Data (CID) ontology, which aim to move toward own your own data model. The CID model ensures authenticity of identity meta-data; high availability via unified Cloud-hosted XML data structure; and privacy through encryption, obfuscation and anonymity applied to Ontology-based XML distributed content. Additionally CID via XML ontologies is enabled for identity federation. The paper also suggests that access over sensitive data should be strictly governed through an access control model with granular policy enforcement on the service side. This includes the involvement of relevant access control model entities, which are enabled to authorize an ad-hoc break-glass data access, which should give high accountability for data access attempts.


Author(s):  
Louise Corti ◽  
Deborah Wiltshire

Robust and standardised licensing and governance frameworks are used to ensure that datasets intended for research use are made available under the terms and conditions specified by a data owner. The UK Data Service makes use of the Five Safes framework to operate its 3-tier data access policy, and ensuring that data classified as personal data can be made available via appropriate legal gateways. This set of principles has gained traction with national statistics around the world, yet it is remarkably absent in the narrative of data access for health research. The health domain tends to focus on ‘data sharing agreements’, and less on training around trust, security and disclosure. The concept of a Safe Health Researcher is missing, yet is appealing. The UK Data Service has been piloting such a half day course, with colleagues in the health domain. The training helps consolidate the less well defined idea of a ‘bona fide’ researcher, typically required by funders such as the UK’s Medical Research Council when accessing their data assets. The term bonafide makes some assumptions about the credentials of the researchers, yet fails to ‘test’ them, instead relying on ‘trust ‘underwritten by the individual’s university, and maybe a short online security course. While purposeful breaches are certainly not common place, a researcher accessing personal or sensitive data would benefit from a structured half-day course that covers aspects of: potential/ actual disclosure risk in health data and appropriate access pathways; safeguards to be put in place when data with risk are shared; and what might constitute a published ‘unsafe’ output, i.e. with a risk of disclosure. The training focuses on health data and research examples, and draws on aspects of the research data management and publishing training undertaken by the UK Data Service (e.g. Corti et al, 2014) and on the UK Statistics Authority approved ‘Safe Research Training’ (SRT) course, which leads to the Accredited Researcher status.


2020 ◽  
Vol 2 (4) ◽  
pp. 222-231
Author(s):  
Bhalaji N ◽  
Aishwarya V ◽  
Krithika Balaji

Medical data of a person is an extremely sensitive and valuable resource. If this data gets into the wrong hands, it can be misused in unimaginable ways. Any organization handling this sort of sensitive data is taking on an extremely huge responsibility. A patient should not have to worry about the safety of his data in the hands of a third-party organization. If he is given control of his sensitive data by eliminating the middle man, then handling such data would become a lot easier. This is where the concept of blockchain is introduced. The blockchain technology proves to be an excellent technology to safeguard such data. A blockchain application which connects multiple entities like hospitals, labs, patients and doctors proves to be the perfect solution to ensure that there is no tampering of data.


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