Proof of policy (PoP): A new attribute-based blockchain consensus protocol

Abstract

Healthcare Blockchains (HBC) are grooming nowadays due to the requirements of flexible Electronic Health Records (EHR) management, privacy needs, and controlled medical data access. Blockchain technology very much suits these requirements and support in various healthcare data access control methods. More focus on improved block generation time gives the expected blockchain performance. Block generation time can be significantly improved by the consensus algorithms used by the system. Traditional consensus algorithm of Proof of Work (PoW) and Proof of Stake (PoS) require heavy computational resources and hence by computational overheads. The proposed system introduces a new privacy-preserving HBC consensus protocol as a consequence of member attribute values and significantly reduced computational resources. The new attribute-based consensus algorithm for HBC called Proof of Policy (PoP) is constructed using Attribute-Based Ring Signature (ABRS). This signature agrees on the stake of attribute-based ring membership and can be considered as an extension of Proof of Stake (PoS). It is also found that the proposed PoP consensus algorithm requires less computational resources than popular PoW and PoS.