Privacy-Preserving in Healthcare Blockchain Systems Based on Lightweight Message Sharing

• Main Authors: Junsong Fu, Na Wang, Yuanyuan Cai
• Format: Article
• Language: English
• Published: MDPI AG 2020-03-01
• Series: Sensors
• Subjects: privacy-preserving; electronic medical records; lightweight message sharing; healthcare blockchain system
• Online Access: https://www.mdpi.com/1424-8220/20/7/1898

Electronic medical records (EMRs) are extremely important for patients’ treatment, doctors’ diagnoses, and medical technology development. In recent years, the distributed healthcare blockchain system has been researched for solving the information isolated island problem in centralized healthcare service systems. However, there still exists a series of important problems such as the patients’ sensitive information security, cross-institutional data sharing, medical quality, and efficiency. In this paper, we establish a lightweight privacy-preserving mechanism for a healthcare blockchain system. First, we apply an interleaving encoder to encrypt the original EMRs. This can hide the sensitive information of EMRs to protect the patient’s privacy security. Second, a (<inline-formula> <math display="inline"> <semantics> <mrow> <mi>t</mi> <mo>,</mo> <mi>n</mi> </mrow> </semantics> </math> </inline-formula>)-threshold lightweight message sharing scheme is presented. The EMRs are mapped to <i>n</i> different short shares, and it can be reconstructed by at least <i>t</i> shares. The EMR shares rather than the original EMRs are stored in the blockchain nodes. This can guarantee high security for EMR sharing and improve the data reconstruction efficiency. Third, the indexes of the stored EMR shares are employed to generate blocks that are chained together and finally form a blockchain. The authorized data users or institutions can recover an EMR by requesting at least <i>t</i> shares of the EMR from the blockchain nodes. In this way, the healthcare blockchain system can not only facilitate the cross-institution sharing process, but also provide proper protections for the EMRs. The security proof and analysis indicate that the proposed scheme can protect the privacy and security of patients’ medical information. The simulation results show that our proposed scheme is more efficient than similar literature in terms of energy consumption and storage space, and the healthcare blockchain system is more stable with the proposed message sharing scheme.