A Blockchain-Based Personal Health Record Sharing Scheme with Security and Privacy Preservation

Personal health records (PHRs) have significant value for health management, accurate diagnosis, and disease research. However, PHR sharing may raise owners’ concerns about security deficiency and privacy leakage. The current mainstream PHR sharing models rely on centralized systems with risks including data loss and tampering, unauthorized access, etc. Fortunately, blockchain possesses outstanding features such as decentralization, tamper-proof, and traceability, which endow it with great potential to solve sensitive data sharing issues. Based on this, we propose a blockchain-based PHR sharing scheme with security and privacy preservation. It utilizes a secure distributed storage system based on InterPlanetary File System (IPFS) and blockchain to avoid data tampering and single points of failure. We also design a decentralized attribute-based access control (ABAC) mechanism to achieve fine-grained controllable PHR sharing. In addition, the blockchain-based proxy re-encryption method can protect the confidentiality of PHR and prevent privacy leakage. Security analysis shows that our scheme achieves the expected security goals. Besides, we evaluated the proposed scheme on Hyperledger Fabric, and the results demonstrate that the scheme is feasible and efficient.