Blockchain-based System for Secure Storage and Sharing of Diabetics Healthcare Records

Abstract

The number of diabetic patients in Saudi Arabia has been increasing recently. Since those patients often visit various healthcare institutions, large amounts of data related to their general health are generated. This imposes a challenge on how to securely store this data and make it accessible for authorized healthcare institutions treating the patient. In this paper, we propose a system that combines blockchain technology with cryptographic primitives and decentralized storage systems to securely store and share medical records for diabetic patients. We analyze the security of the proposed scheme in terms of data confidentiality, data integrity, data availability, and user privacy. We encipher the healthcare records and store them in the distributed InterPlanetary File System (IPFS). This is to preserve the secrecy of sensitive healthcare data and to avoid the single point of failure issues. Blockchain is used only to store the hash value of the healthcare records and their location in the IPFS, resulting in lower operational costs while preserving the integrity of the healthcare data. To enforce fine-grained access control, our system allows the patient to determine who can access their medical records with the help of an attributebased encryption scheme. Only authorized users can decipher and access the original health data if they own the appropriate attributes defined in the access policy.