Blockchain-enabled secure and efficient data sharing scheme for trust management in healthcare smartphone network

Abstract

The Internet of Medical Things (IoMT) is an extended genre of the Internet of Things (IoT) where the Things collaborate to provide remote patient health monitoring, also known as the Internet of Health (IoH). Smartphones and IoMTs are expected to maintain secure and trusted confidential patient record exchange while managing the patient remotely. Healthcare organizations deploy Healthcare Smartphone Networks (HSN) for personal patient data collection and sharing among smartphone users and IoMT nodes. However, attackers gain access to confidential patient data via infected IoMT nodes on the HSN. Additionally, attackers can compromise the entire network via malicious nodes. This article proposes a Hyperledger blockchain-based technique to identify compromised IoMT nodes and safeguard sensitive patient records. Furthermore, the paper presents a Clustered Hierarchical Trust Management System (CHTMS) to block malicious nodes. In addition, the proposal employs Elliptic Curve Cryptography (ECC) to protect sensitive health records and is resilient against Denial-Of-Service (DOS) attacks. Finally, the evaluation results show that integrating blockchains into the HSN system improved detection performance compared to the existing state of the art. Therefore, the simulation results indicate better security and reliability when compared to conventional databases.