A Blockchain‐based Framework for Privacy Preservation of Electronic Health Records (EHRs)

Healthcare Records are becoming more valuable than ever due to the emergence of various new diseases and the current pandemic. These records are scattered throughout multiple healthcare providers in several places. Keeping them in physical form is time-consuming; thus, they need to be kept in electronic form. Electronic Healthcare Records (EHRs) are mostly managed at the individual company level, creating a single point of failure and exposing users to various security risks, including amateur-level attacks and data breaches by hackers. This article proposes a permissioned blockchain-based framework to overcome the above issues for secured storage and sharing of EHRs over the network. For the overall implementation of the framework Hyperledger Fabric (HLF), InterPlanetary Distributed File System (IPFS), and Identity Based Proxy Re-Encryption (IB-PRE) algorithm are used. To create proposed blockchain network, HLF is used. To manage EHRs on the blockchain, IPFS is used where the actual encrypted massive data is stored off-chain, and their corresponding hash values are stored on the blockchain. Further, IB-PRE algorithm is used to share EHRs in a safe manner, where a proxy node retrieves requested data from IPFS, performs re-encryption, and returns the re-encrypted data to the requester thus, ensures user privacy and data integrity. Finally, the Hyperledger Caliper tool is used to run a performance test to check the system efficiency in terms of throughput and latency. Features and performance-based comparisons of the proposed and existing related work are made to demonstrate the effectiveness.