A Blockchain-Assisted Revocable and Efficient ABSE Scheme for Secure Medical Data Sharing
Hancheng Gao, WU Xiao-yu, Haiping Huang, Qi Li, Xing Yizheng · ACM Transactions on the Web · 2025
Efficient and privacy-preserving medical data sharing remains a key challenge in the era of digital healthcare. Existing schemes often suffer from limited access control, substantial computational overhead, and reliance on trusted third parties. This article proposes a revocable Attribute-Based Searchable Encryption (ABSE) scheme built upon a hierarchical blockchain architecture, which enables a secure keyword search over encrypted data via expressive attribute-based access policies, and a revocation mechanism is integrated to support dynamic user management. We design a lightweight and privacy-preserving computation framework that offloads expensive cryptographic operations to the cloud, thereby reducing the burden on user-side devices. Furthermore, we propose a lightweight consensus protocol, termed lottery consensus, which replaces traditional proof-of-work hash computations with meaningful operations that are tied to the ABSE-based data-sharing process. Extensive theoretical analysis and simulation experiments demonstrate the superior efficiency of the proposed scheme, and formal security proofs demonstrate its robustness against threats.