Design and Implementation of Efficient Personal Health-Records Sharing in IoMT using Searchable Symmetric Encryption, Blockchain and IPFS

Abstract

In this thesis, we focus on the secure storage and sharing of Personal Health Records (PHRs) in Internet of Medical Things (IoMT). Due to the high value of personal health information, PHRs are one of the favorite targets of cyber attackers worldwide. Over the years, many solutions, including those based on blockchain, have been proposed; however, most solutions are inefficient for practical applications. For instance, several existing schemes rely on bilinear pairings, which incur high computational costs. To mitigate these issues, we propose a novel PHR-sharing scheme that is dynamic, efficient, and practical. Specifically, we combine searchable symmetric encryption, blockchain technology, and a decentralized storage system known as the Inter-Planetary File System (IPFS) to guarantee the confidentiality of PHRs, verifiability of search results, and forward security. We start by introducing cloud and blockchain and then provide a detailed literature survey of existing works that make use of these technologies for storage and sharing of health records. We then propose our own scheme which provides better security and better efficiency than existing schemes for storage and sharing of PHRs. Moreover, we provide formal security proofs for the proposed scheme and also provide extensive test-bed experimental results which demonstrate that the proposed scheme can be used in practical scenarios related to the IoMT environment.