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An on-chain and off-chain collaborative data sharing and access control model for electronic medical records

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Abstract

The rapid development of the healthcare industry has generated a large volume of electronic medical record data, which is stored across various hospitals. However, due to the sensitivity of medical data, it is prone to privacy breaches. Traditional ciphertext-policy attribute-based encryption schemes face several challenges, including excessive storage overhead for encrypted medical data, public access control policies, difficulties in data sharing between different hospitals, and the inability of patients to control the usage of their medical records. To address these issues, this paper proposes a blockchain-based attribute encryption access control model with constant-size ciphertext and hidden policy (ABE-BC-CSCHP). Firstly, by using an AND gate access structure based on multivalued attributes and wildcards, the model achieves a constant ciphertext size, thereby reducing both blockchain storage overhead and the computational cost of encryption and decryption. Secondly, medical data are stored in a hybrid on-chain and off-chain manner: encrypted medical data is stored off-chain in a distributed file storage system, while keyword index ciphertexts are stored on-chain. The access policies are embedded within the index ciphertext components to achieve policy hiding. Lastly, the model allows users to securely and accurately search encrypted medical data on the blockchain using a searchable encryption algorithm. To avoid single points of failure and to provide patients with flexible control over the usage of their data, the model designs multiple attribute authorities and allows patients to customize access policies. Finally, the security analysis and performance analysis compared with the current existing research shows that the model proposed in this paper is effective.

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Funding

This work was supported by the National Natural Science Foundation of China (No.72471206,71972165,61763048,72164037), Major Science and Technology Special Plan of Yunnan Province Science and Technology Plan Project (No.202402AD080040), Key Projects of Basic Research for Science and Technology Foundation of Yunnan Province (No.202001AS070031), the Central Government’s Special Program for Guiding Local Science and Technology Development (No.202307AB110009), Science and Technology Foundation of Yunnan Province Education Department (No.2023J0657), and the Postgraduate Innovation Foundation of Yunnan University of Finance and Economics (No.2024YUFEYC012).

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. Faculty of Information Engineering and Automation, Kunming University of Science and Technology, Kunming, 650500, China

    Bo Wang

  2. Yunnan Key Laboratory of Service Computing, Yunnan University of Finance and Economics, Kunming, 650221, China

    Rong Jiang & Hejiao Zhang

  3. Yunnan Key Laboratory of Service Computing, Kunming, 650221, China

    Bo Wang & Xuetao Pu

Authors
  1. Bo Wang
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  2. Rong Jiang
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  3. Xuetao Pu
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  4. Hejiao Zhang
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Contributions

Bo Wang presented writing—original draft, formal analysis, data curation, visualization, and writing—review and editing. Rong Jiang provided conceptualization, methodology, investigation, supervision, writing—review and editing, and funding acquisition. Xuetao Pu carried out data curation, methodology, and writing—review and editing. Hejiao Zhang performed writing—review and editing and supervision.

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Correspondence to Rong Jiang.

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Wang, B., Jiang, R., Pu, X. et al. An on-chain and off-chain collaborative data sharing and access control model for electronic medical records. J Supercomput 81, 396 (2025). https://doi.org/10.1007/s11227-024-06884-2

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  • DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s11227-024-06884-2

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