An Efficient Blockchain-Based Hierarchical Data Sharing for Healthcare Internet of Things

With the assistance of the Internet of Things, the fast developing Healthcare Internet of Things (H-IoT) has promoted the healthcare ecosystem into the era of Health 5.0 and enables many promising medical applications, such as remote healthcare that is crucial in pandemic (e.g., coronavirus disease 2019). Healthcare participants can make accurate diagnosis, treatment, and research based on the shared personal health records (PHRs) sensed from remote H-IoT devices. However, current H-IoT systems fall short of a secure and trustworthy PHR sharing service in remote healthcare, which is able to prevent user privacy leakage and PHR integrity violation together with high efficiency in key distribution alongside efficient data retrieval and fine-grained access control. In response, we present a blockchain-based hierarchical data sharing framework (BHDSF) to provide fine-grained access control and efficient retrieval over encrypted PHRs with low consumed hierarchical key distribution and key leakage resistance. Compared with the existing solutions, the BHDSF takes both untrusted cloud and malicious auditor into consideration simultaneously and achieves trustworthy PHR integrity auditing and metadata verification by leveraging the blockchain technique. Besides, the BHDSF enables efficiently aggregative authentication for the trustworthiness of source records from H-IoT devices, which is lacked in most of the existing data sharing frameworks. Finally, we demonstrate the feasibility of the BHDSF by conducting extensive empirical tests over a real-world dataset.