SENSH: a blockchain-based searchable encrypted data sharing scheme in smart healthcare

Area of Science:

• Health Informatics
• Cybersecurity
• Blockchain Technology

Background:

• The proliferation of Internet of Things (IoT) in healthcare has amplified concerns regarding medical data security, privacy, and efficient retrieval.
• Traditional data querying methods present significant risks of data leakage, poor performance, and high storage demands.

Purpose of the Study:

• To propose a comprehensive solution, the Secure ENcrypted Search for Health Scheme (SENSH), addressing security, privacy, and efficiency challenges in medical data management.
• To enhance the protection and accessibility of sensitive health information within intelligent healthcare systems.

Main Methods:

• Implementation of a consortium blockchain framework combined with searchable encryption techniques.
• Utilization of Bloom filters for efficient authorization management and off-chain Advanced Encryption Standard (AES) for data protection.
• Integration of event triggering, logging, version control, timestamping, and an obfuscation factor for robust data security and dynamic updates.

Main Results:

• SENSH demonstrates superior performance in authorization management, privacy preservation, and defense against tampering, anti-replay, and Distributed Denial of Service (DDoS) attacks.
• The scheme exhibits significant advantages over existing methods in terms of reduced gas consumption, computation cost, and execution time.
• Experimental validation confirms the effectiveness of SENSH in protecting and enabling efficient queries of medical and health data.

Conclusions:

• SENSH offers a secure, efficient, and compliant solution for managing and querying sensitive medical data in the era of intelligent healthcare.
• The proposed scheme effectively balances data security, privacy, and query performance, making it highly suitable for modern healthcare applications.