A Quantum Resistant Blockchain System for Privacy Protection of Patient Records
Smita Bansod, Lata L. Ragha · International Journal of Engineering Trends and Technology · 2023
In the present digital era, Personal Data Privacy is considered one of the fundamental rights in many countries, and regulation demands strict compliance with privacy laws. Patient Health Records in electronic form are highly personal and must be handled with due care and sensitivity to ensure the individual's privacy by giving full control to the patient by employing a self-sovereign model and, at the same time, protected from attacks by hackers. While blockchain technology, with its distributed ledger and immutability, promises to take care of the basic privacy and security requirements of personal digital data, there are several areas where improvements are needed in order to make this technology a robust, practical system. This paper proposes a system which introduces the privacy protection mechanisms to be applied to a blockchain-based patient records system for full privacy protection. The data is shared between different stakeholders in an encrypted format with a session key operational for a predetermined amount of time. The session keys are managed by private certificate authorization with quantum resistance NTRU algorithm. A comparative analysis of various asymmetric key cryptography algorithms indicates that Enhanced NTRU is superior in performance and provides the best security. The encrypted Electronic Health Record (EHR) is stored using Interplanetary File System (IPFS) protocol, and its hashes are recorded on the Ethereum blockchain test network. IPFS solves the issue of storing a large amount of data on the blockchain, and encryption solves the data transparency with Public Key Infrastructure (PKI) to resolve the authentication of the stakeholders. The proposed system's response time, latency, resource utilization and efficiency have been assessed experimentally for various transactions. The proposed system ensures patient confidentiality while sharing health records, making it future-proof.