HealthFort: A Cloud-Based eHealth System With Conditional Forward Transparency and Secure Provenance via Blockchain
Shiyu Li, Yuan Zhang, Chunxiang Xu, Nan Cheng, Zhi Liu, Yicong Du, Xuemin Shen
Abstract
In this paper, we propose a servers-aided password-based subsequent-key-locked encryption mechanism to ensure the confidentiality of outsourced electronic health records (EHRs). The encryption mechanism achieves conditional forward transparency: a doctor can only access a patient's EHRs related to the current diagnosis with the patient's delegation. It also achieves portability: to delegate a doctor for accessing a specific part of EHRs, the patient only needs to send one key (at most 256 bits) in addition to the delegation information to the doctor; the patient does not need to maintain any secret in a local device. Then, we propose a blockchain-based secure EHR provenance mechanism, where a data structure of EHR provenance record is designed to precisely reflect the EHRs’ provenance information; a smart contract on a public blockchain is deployed to secure both EHRs and the corresponding provenance records. Finally, we develop a cloud-based eHealth system, dubbed HealthFort, based on the two mechanisms. Security analysis and comprehensive performance evaluation are conducted to demonstrate that HealthFort is secure and efficient.