A Blockchain-based secure PHR data storage and sharing framework
Ayoub Ghani, Ahmed Zinedine, Mohammed El Mohajir · 2020
The appearance of Covid-19 proves the deficiency of world health care systems to handle exponentially infected-patients and to deal with lack of personal health records (PHR). As it is known, data is valuable in such situation. Current solutions for storing and sharing PHR data adopt centralized solutions, such as cloud-based totally centralized data centers, which requires a fully-trusted third party. Therefore, it suffers from single point of failure, data deleting and network delay. To overcome these issues, we propose in this paper a Blockchain-based secure PHR data storage and sharing framework that leverages the benefits of IPFS (Inter Planetary File System). Our aim is to ensure privacy with patient full control over his data and to enhance scalability. To this end, we use steganography to hide sensitive data within PHR data, and then it is uploaded to IPFS network. However, IPFS Hash delivered by IPFS network is divided into n secret shares using Shamir's Secret Sharing (SSS) algorithm, which ensures security. Moreover, Ethereum smart contract automates the execution of access control strategies defined by the owner, as well as, traceability and auditability insurance.