A Smart-Contract-Based Access Control Framework for Cloud Smart Healthcare System

Abstract

In current healthcare systems, electronic medical records (EMRs) are always located in different hospitals and controlled by a centralized cloud provider. However, it leads to single point of failure as patients being the real owner lose track of their private and sensitive EMRs. Hence, this article aims to build an access control framework based on smart contract, which is built on the top of distributed ledger (blockchain), to secure the sharing of EMRs among different entities involved in the smart healthcare system. For this, we propose four forms of smart contracts for user verification, access authorization, misbehavior detection, and access revocation, respectively. In this framework, considering the block size of ledger and huge amount of patient data, the EMRs are stored in cloud after being encrypted through the cryptographic functions of elliptic curve cryptography (ECC) and Edwards-curve digital signature algorithm (EdDSA), while their corresponding hashes are packed into blockchain. The performance evaluation based on a private Ethereum system is used to verify the efficiency of proposed access control framework in the real-time smart healthcare system.