IEEE Access (Jan 2024)
A Secure Medical Data Sharing Framework for Fight Against Pandemics Like Covid-19 by Using Public Blockchain
Abstract
The global impact of the COVID-19 pandemic was huge, and it showed that reporting and collecting accurate healthcare data are crucial operations for governments. Not only the test results but also the vaccination information of people should be shared correctly by trusted systems between countries. Now it is possible with the integration of new practices like blockchain and cryptology with the help of secure, transparent, and privacy-centric methods. There are a lot of recent studies focusing on blockchain usage in healthcare in literature. However, they still have flaws in granting full authorization to individuals, ensuring the security of personal information, speed, and scalability. They mostly use private or consortium blockchains. However, in a public blockchain, a system that everyone can participate in and follow provides more reliable information. At the same time, heavy and slow encryption techniques were used in the models proposed in the literature. Our study focuses on the usage of blockchain in combating pandemics by ensuring privacy and maintaining reliable medical data sharing during pandemics. The proposed system is implemented by leveraging public blockchain on Ethereum with smart contracts, IPFS for decentralized storage, and robust and fast encryption techniques like ChaCha20. In addition to existing techniques, the framework introduces innovative methods, such as storing encrypted keys alongside encrypted data in IPFS, which enhances security and scalability. We also eliminate the usage of doctors’ private keys. The framework grants patient’s full ownership of their medical data, aligning with GDPR requirements. Patients can grant or revoke access to their data, enhancing their control over personal information. The use of smart contracts to manage access rights ensures that only authorized parties can access the data, and patients can easily manage these permissions through a decentralized platform. We aim to implement a framework which is fast, easy to use and differs in terms of storing and sharing medical data with different encryption methods and protocols by using a public blockchain. We ensure novel management of COVID-19 medical records that are personal data.
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