Enhancing privacy and security in smart healthcare: A blockchain-powered decentralized data dissemination scheme

Dissemination of health data in smart healthcare allows a patient's health information to be accessible across healthcare communities for the improvement of patients' care services. In our work, data collected from a patient's automated health device is distributed to the communities through the blockchain network. Blockchain technology paves the way for the health sector to run in a decentralized system. To achieve a secure decentralized data dissemination, the transmitted health data must be reliable, that is, data is assured originated from a legitimate device without unlawful alteration. However, verification of such reliability may jeopardize a patient's privacy. In healthcare, privacy is of the utmost importance to protect sensitive health data. At the same time, should misbehavior arise, malicious entities should be held accountable. We satisfy these conflicting requirements of reliability, privacy and accountability with our proposed secure decentralized data dissemination scheme for smart healthcare that integrates a certificate-based signcryption with a proxy re-encryption (Sign-Proxy) scheme and an Improved Delegated Proof-of-Stake (DPoS) consensus protocol for the system construction. The Sign-Proxy provides users a desirable level of security while delivering lightweight computation for limited computing capabilities of automated health devices. In parallel, the Improved DPoS facilitates the streamlined and secure adoption of a consortium blockchain framework. The security and performance analysis indicate that the proposed scheme is resilience against adversarial attacks, achieves overall efficiency, and feasible for real-world deployment.