A Secure Blockchain-Based Access Control Architecture for IoT-Healthcare Applications

Abstract

Nowadays, the demand for the Internet of Medical Things (IoMT) is likely to be driven by the need for real-time health monitoring to handle chronic diseases. Designing a distributed and reliable access control and user authentication scheme for IoMT involves multiple layers of security measures to ensure the integrity, confidentiality, as well as availability of sensitive patient data. However, the major problem with smart healthcare systems is data security and privacy. Blockchain can resolve these issues due to its immutability and transparency features. Most of the existing research enhances security and data privacy but they do not consider the overhead, delay, and scalability. The clustering-based proposed approach adopted the real-world issues of blockchain, i.e., delay, and scalability. It is an efficient access control approach that enables users to establish their desired access control policy to protect their private medical data. It uses a dual chain mechanism in which the access policies are stored in one chain, while the data transactions are stored in another chain. This approach addresses the challenge of access control resolution by enabling data owners to decide their desirable access policies. The experimental results show the efficiency of the proposed scheme in terms of processing time, computational time and its resilience against various security threats.