Blockchain in healthcare system: Security issues, attacks and challenges

Abstract

The Healthcare system as an organization has the important requirements corresponding to security and privacy, for example, protecting patients’ medical information from unauthorized access, secure drug tracking, secure communication with transport like ambulance, secure and smart e-health monitoring. But due to lack of expert design of security protocols, the healthcare system is facing many security threats such as interoperability, authenticity, data sharing, the conveying of medical data, and deliberations of mobile health. In such a scenario, blockchain may help because of its unique properties. The blockchain ledger, formed by applying digital signature schemes, consensus mechanisms, and chain of hashing, offers highly reliable storage capabilities. Due to the aforementioned characteristics, blockchain provides various services like integrity, traceability, security, and non-repudiation, by storing the information in a public decentralized environment so that privacy preservation can be maintained. It is required to explore the security issues, different attacks and challenges when blockchain is applied in healthcare, which can help to design a more strong security protocol in a distributed environment. Therefore, this book chapter focuses on (a) different applications of healthcare where blockchain can be applied, (b) requirements of blockchain in such applications, (c) different possible security attacks in the blockchain-based healthcare system, (d) security issues and challenges to design protocols using blockchain, and (e) future directions to the research to be explored more.