Secure Cloud-Based Electronic Health Records: Cross-Patient Block-Level Deduplication with Blockchain Auditing

Area of Science:

• Health Informatics
• Cloud Computing Security
• Blockchain Technology

Background:

• Exponential growth of digital information presents data management challenges.
• Cloud-based Electronic Health Records (EHR) sharing offers benefits like improved accessibility and interoperability.
• Centralized cloud storage raises concerns regarding data privacy, security, and integrity validation without third-party auditors (TPAs).

Purpose of the Study:

• To propose a novel cloud storage auditing technique for secure EHR sharing.
• To ensure data integrity verification without relying on TPAs, thereby enhancing patient privacy.
• To implement cross-patient block-level deduplication with strong privacy protection.

Main Methods:

• Introduction of blockchain technology for decentralized and transparent integrity verification.
• Generation of an index for EHRs to facilitate block-level duplicate checks.
• Implementation of a novel strategy to prevent unauthorized access to sensitive EHR data.

Main Results:

• The proposed scheme effectively verifies data integrity without a TPA.
• Enhanced privacy protection is maintained throughout the EHR sharing process.
• Security is established against factorization and decrypt exponent attacks.
• Performance evaluation shows superior efficiency in file authenticator generation, challenge creation, and proof verification compared to existing methods.

Conclusions:

• The novel blockchain-based approach provides a secure and efficient solution for EHR data integrity auditing in cloud storage.
• Eliminating the need for TPAs addresses privacy and confidentiality concerns associated with healthcare data.
• The technique offers a robust framework for managing and securing large volumes of digital health information.