Preserving Patient’s Privacy using Proxy Re-encryption in Permissioned Blockchain

Abstract

Privacy is a fundamental right for every human, but in today’s world, this is not ensured in every sector. The health sector is such an example where patients privacy is not respected, and sensitive data like prescription dosages, medical bill amounts, and their entire medical history are leaked online without any encryption. We designed, implemented and deployed an architecture in this research where we tried to use Public Key Infrastructure (PKI) and Hyperledger fabric and simulated workflow of healthcare sector while ensuring that patients’ medical records are in complete control of patient only. Hyperledger fabric [1], which is a blockchain framework, provides integrity to the medical records, which can be verified at any later point of time. Proxy re-encryption [2] has been used to provide medical records access to others but only with permission from the patient. Besides patients and hospitals, this architecture also involves other institutions like insurance companies and pharmacies to provide various services to the patients. Lastly, we performed some performance experiments on the architecture to check the throughput and latencies.