Skip to main content

Advertisement

SpringerLink
Log in

Securing e-health records using keyless signature infrastructure blockchain technology in the cloud

  • Intelligent Biomedical Data Analysis and Processing
  • Published:
Neural Computing and Applications Aims and scope Submit manuscript

Abstract

Health record maintenance and sharing are one of the essential tasks in the healthcare system. In this system, loss of confidentiality leads to a passive impact on the security of health record whereas loss of integrity leads can have a serious impact such as loss of a patient’s life. Therefore, it is of prime importance to secure electronic health records. Health records are represented by Fast Healthcare Interoperability Resources standards and managed by Health Level Seven International Healthcare Standards Organization. Centralized storage of health data is attractive to cyber-attacks and constant viewing of patient records is challenging. Therefore, it is necessary to design a system using the cloud that helps to ensure authentication and that also provides integrity to health records. The keyless signature infrastructure used in the proposed system for ensuring the secrecy of digital signatures also ensures aspects of authentication. Furthermore, data integrity is managed by the proposed blockchain technology. The performance of the proposed framework is evaluated by comparing the parameters like average time, size, and cost of data storage and retrieval of the blockchain technology with conventional data storage techniques. The results show that the response time of the proposed system with the blockchain technology is almost 50% shorter than the conventional techniques. Also they express the cost of storage is about 20% less for the system with blockchain in comparison with the existing techniques.

This is a preview of subscription content, log in via an institution to check access.

Access this article

Log in via an institution

Price excludes VAT (USA)
Tax calculation will be finalised during checkout.

Instant access to the full article PDF.

Institutional subscriptions

Fig. 1
Fig. 2
Fig. 3

Similar content being viewed by others

References

  1. Herlihy M, Moir M (2016) Enhancing accountability and trust in distributed ledgers. arXiv preprint arXiv:1606.07490

  2. Zou J, Wang Y, Orgun MA (2016, June) A dispute arbitration protocol based on a peer-to-peer service contract management scheme. In: 2016 IEEE international conference on web services (ICWS). IEEE, pp 41–48

  3. Bhattacharjya A, Zhong X, Wang J (2016, March) Strong, efficient and reliable personal messaging peer to peer architecture based on Hybrid RSA. In: Proceedings of the international conference on internet of things and cloud computing. ACM, p 46

  4. Fisher J, Sanchez MH (2016) Authentication and verification of digital data utilizing blockchain technology. U.S. Patent Application 15/083,238

  5. Goyal V, Pandey O, Sahai A, Waters B (2006, October) Attribute-based encryption for fine-grained access control of encrypted data. In: Proceedings of the 13th ACM conference on Computer and communications security. ACM, pp 89–98

  6. Lewko A, Waters B (2011, May) Decentralizing attribute-based encryption. In: Annual international conference on the theory and applications of cryptographic techniques. Springer, Berlin, pp 568–588

    Chapter  Google Scholar 

  7. Horváth M (2015, January) Attribute-based encryption optimized for cloud computing. In: International conference on current trends in theory and practice of informatics. Springer, Berlin, pp 566–577

    Google Scholar 

  8. Nimje AR, Gaikwad VT, Datir HN (2013) Attribute-based encryption techniques in cloud computing security: an overview. Int J Comput Trends Technol 4:2231

    Google Scholar 

  9. Hengartner U, Steenkiste P (2005) Exploiting hierarchical identity-based encryption for access control to pervasive computing information. In: SECURECOMM’05: Proceedings of the of the first international conference on security and privacy for emerging areas in comm, Networks, pp 384–396

  10. Joye M, Neven G (2009) Forward-secure hierarchical IBE with applications to broadcast encryption. Ident Based Cryptogr 2:100

    Google Scholar 

  11. Wang S, Zhou J, Liu JK, Yu J, Chen J, Xie W (2016) An efficient file hierarchy attribute-based encryption scheme in cloud computing. IEEE Tran Inf Forens Secur 11(6):1265–1277

    Article  Google Scholar 

  12. Rahmani AM, Thanigaivelan NK, Gia TN, Granados J, Negash B, Liljeberg P, Tenhunen H (2015, January) Smart e-health gateway: bringing intelligence to internet-of-things based ubiquitous healthcare systems. In: 2015 12th annual IEEE consumer communications and networking conference (CCNC). IEEE, pp 826–834

  13. Begam S, Praveen H (2016) U-healthcare and IoT. Int J Comput Sci Mobile Comput 5(8):138–142

    Google Scholar 

  14. Rajput DS, Gour R (2017) An IoT framework for healthcare monitoring system. LAP LAMBERT Academic Publishing, Cambridge

    Google Scholar 

  15. Liang X, Shetty S, Tosh D, Kamhoua C, Kwiat K, Njilla L (2017, May). Provchain: a blockchain-based data provenance architecture in cloud environment with enhanced privacy and availability. In: Proceedings of the 17th IEEE/ACM international symposium on cluster, cloud and grid computing. IEEE Press, pp 468–477

  16. Ekblaw A, Azaria A, Halamka JD, Lippman A (2016) A case study for blockchain in healthcare:“MedRec” prototype for electronic health records and medical research data. Proc IEEE Open Big Data Conf 13:13

    Google Scholar 

  17. Bos JW, Halderman JA, Heninger N, Moore J, Naehrig M, Wustrow E (2014, March) Elliptic curve cryptography in practice. In: International conference on financial cryptography and data security. Springer, Berlin, pp 157–175

    Google Scholar 

  18. Xia J, Taveira J, Nunes M, Lingli D, Huang R, Cruz R (2016) Peer-to-peer streaming tracker protocol (PPSTP), No. RFC 7846

  19. Yeh LY, Huang YL, Joseph AD, Shieh SW, Tsaur WJ (2012) A batch-authenticated and key agreement framework for p2p-based online social networks. IEEE Trans Veh Technol 61(4):1907–1924

    Article  Google Scholar 

  20. Wang X, Xu S (2012, May) A secure access control scheme based on group for peer to peer network. In: 2012 International conference on systems and informatics (ICSAI). IEEE, pp 1507–1511

  21. Badra S, Gomaab I, Abd-Elrahmanb E (2018) Multi-tier Blockchain framework for IoT-EHRs systems. Int Conf Emerg Ubiquitous Syst Pervasive Netw 141:159–166

    Google Scholar 

  22. Rodrigues JJ, Segundo DBDR, Junqueira HA, Sabino MH, Prince RM, Al-Muhtadi J, De Albuquerque VHC (2018) Enabling technologies for the internet of health things. IEEE Access 6:13129–13141

    Article  Google Scholar 

  23. da Cruz MAA, Rodrigues JJPC, Al-Muhtadi J, Korotaev VV, de Albuquerque VHC (2018) A reference model for internet of things middleware. IEEE Internet Things J 5(2):871–883

    Article  Google Scholar 

  24. Balamurugan B, Krishna PV, Kumar NS, Rajyalakshmi GV (2015) An efficient framework for health system based on hybrid cloud with ABE-outsourced decryption. In: Artificial intelligence and evolutionary algorithms in engineering systems. Springer, New Delhi, pp 41–49

    Google Scholar 

  25. Hussein AF, ArunKumar N, Ramirez-Gonzalez G, Abdulhay E, Tavares JMR de Albuquerque VHC (2018) A medical records managing and securing blockchain based system supported by a genetic algorithm and discrete wavelet transform. Cogn Syst Res 52:1–11

    Article  Google Scholar 

  26. Mahmoud MM, Rodrigues JJ, Ahmed SH, Shah SC, Al-Muhtadi JF, Korotaev VV, De Albuquerque VHC (2018) Enabling technologies on cloud of things for smart healthcare. IEEE Access 6:31950–31967

    Article  Google Scholar 

Download references

Author information

Authors and Affiliations

  1. Department of Information Technology, Thiagarajar College of Engineering, Madurai, India

    Gayathri Nagasubramanian & Muthuramalingam Sankayya

  2. Department of Computer Science and Engineering, PTR College of Engineering and Technology, Madurai, India

    Rakesh Kumar Sakthivel

  3. School of Computing Science and Engineering, Galgotias University, Noida, India

    Rizwan Patan & Balamurugan Balusamy

  4. School of Business, Stevens Institute of Technology, Hoboken, NJ, USA

    Amir H. Gandomi

Authors
  1. Gayathri Nagasubramanian
    View author publications

    You can also search for this author in PubMed Google Scholar

  2. Rakesh Kumar Sakthivel
    View author publications

    You can also search for this author in PubMed Google Scholar

  3. Rizwan Patan
    View author publications

    You can also search for this author in PubMed Google Scholar

  4. Amir H. Gandomi
    View author publications

    You can also search for this author in PubMed Google Scholar

  5. Muthuramalingam Sankayya
    View author publications

    You can also search for this author in PubMed Google Scholar

  6. Balamurugan Balusamy
    View author publications

    You can also search for this author in PubMed Google Scholar

Corresponding author

Correspondence to Amir H. Gandomi.

Ethics declarations

Conflict of interest

The authors declare that they have no conflict of interest.

Additional information

Publisher's Note

Springer Nature remains neutral with regard to jurisdictional claims in published maps and institutional affiliations.

Rights and permissions

Reprints and permissions

About this article

Check for updates. Verify currency and authenticity via CrossMark

Cite this article

Nagasubramanian, G., Sakthivel, R.K., Patan, R. et al. Securing e-health records using keyless signature infrastructure blockchain technology in the cloud. Neural Comput & Applic 32, 639–647 (2020). https://doi.org/10.1007/s00521-018-3915-1

Download citation

  • Received:

  • Accepted:

  • Published:

  • Issue Date:

  • DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s00521-018-3915-1

Keywords

Search

Navigation