The protection of EMR using ABAC and Merkle DAG
Saba Alsakran, Talal Albalawi · 2025
Hospitals must protect their patients’ data and provide them with the means of care and convenience. Any unauthorized change in a patient&s;s medical records could result in the harm or even death of that patient and legal problems for the hospital. To avoid these issues, hospitals must provide all methods to protect the integrity of medical records. Attribute-based access control (ABAC) is an authorization framework that assesses features and protects patients&s; privacy. A Merkle Directed acyclic graph (DAG) is an excellent way to protect medical record integrity, allowing a Merkle root property to detect data integrity violations. In this paper, we present an implementation of attribute-based access control to protect the privacy of patients and a novel Merkle DAG-based method for safeguarding the accuracy of medical records data. We also present an approach that simplifies the use of the blockchain by using the Merkle DAG to prevent block mining in the blockchain. We can examine all the ‘branches’ of the tree connected to it going up to the root hash by using a Merkle proof.