Anonymization of data in the IoT-Blockchain environment: Case Study - Electronic Health Record (EHR) in healthcare systems
Aymen Bebba, Bachir Dou, Saci Medileh
كلية العلوم الدقيقة-جامعة الشهيد حمة لخضر - الوادي · الجزائر
The critical nature of Electronic Health Records (EHR), and the technological advancement in the field of data privacy required researchers to come up with new strategies to handle EHRs in the healthcare industry. Many researchers have been investigating the possibility of integrating Blockchain technology to cloud-based EHR system architecture to increase the security of the health information within the system. However, EHR systems require more security to protect it for different attacks like Sybil Attacks and Linking Attacks. In this thesis, we propose a new data preservation mechanism called Anonymity Preservation Mechanism (APM), which provides another level of protection to health information of EHR systems by implementing a method of a multilayer cryptography to patient records. Moreover, this method splits patient records into two categories; identifiable information, and none identifiable information, implementing complicated hashing mechanism to the identifiable information which results a pseudo identities that do not link to the patient real identity, the none identifiable information go through an AES encryption method which uses a secret key to produce a secure ciphertext of the original data. Additionally, the generated outputs from the previous operations enter another phase of encryption by RSA cryptosystem, this multilayer encryption process produce a secure anonymized patient record. Furthermore, we integrated our proposed APM to our enhanced Blockchain-based EHR management system architecture. Lastly, we provided a prototype of our proposed APM and presented its implementation results in the system.