ENHANCING HEALTHCARE DATA-SHARING SECURITY WITH BLOCKCHAIN AND POST-QUANTUM CRYPTOGRAPHY
Jen-Wei Hu · Journal of Mechanics in Medicine and Biology · 2025
With the rapid advancement of healthcare technologies, Electronic Medical Records (EMRs), have become invaluable resources for enhancing public health. However, these data are typically managed by the healthcare service systems of individual medical institutions. Due to privacy concerns and the complexity of system integration, many institutions are hesitant to share their data, leading to the formation of data silos. The emergence of blockchain technology offers a promising solution for facilitating cross-institutional health data sharing within the Internet of Medical Things (IoMT). Nevertheless, blockchain technology, while promising, has limitations in fully safeguarding privacy. In this paper, we propose a secure and efficient user-centric data-sharing system based on consortium blockchain technology. To ensure robust privacy protection in cross-institutional transactions, our scheme employs lattice-based cryptography, a quantum-resistant cryptographic technique. Additionally, we propose an enhanced proxy re-encryption mechanism that enables granular access control over outsourced data and mitigates the risk of collusion between semi-trusted cloud servers and unauthorized data requesters. Furthermore, our system grants data owners complete control over their medical data, empowering them to selectively share information while maintaining the privacy of sensitive details across different institutions. Through rigorous security and experimental analyses, our scheme is shown to be more efficient and practical than existing alternatives. Moreover, when evaluating performances across various medical data sizes, our scheme significantly reduces computational overhead compared to other systems.