RSHealth: A Ring Signature Scheme for Identity Anonymization and Transaction Privacy in Blockchain Based E-Healthcare Systems

Abstract

The current healthcare infrastructure faces significant challenges, including security vulnerabilities, privacy breaches, data inconsistencies, and overly accessible health records. These issues highlight the urgent need for comprehensive reforms in information management and patient data protection. To address the current issues, the present work proposes RSHealth framework, an e-healthcare ring signature scheme. It is a promising solution for ensuring anti-tampering of transaction fie and identity anonymization of sender healthcare stakeholder during transmission from main healthcare community to a branch healthcare community, maintaining compliance with data privacy regulation. The RSHealth scheme includes five functions: TFSetup(), TFKeygen(), TFRing(), TFVerify(), and TFOpen(). These functions respectively initialize system parameters, generate keys, create ring signatures, verify authenticity, and reveal signer identities by authorized receiver healthcare stakeholders. Extensive experimentation is performed for aforementioned framework to judge the latency and throughput; varying sender healthcare stakeholder and sizes of transaction. The performance analysis shows that increasing sender healthcare stakeholder and transaction sizes leads to increased throughput and decreased latency.

Keywords

• Blockchain
• e-healthcare system
• privacy
• ring signature
• security