Decentralized privacy-preserving framework for health care record-keeping over hyperledger fabric

Abstract

Some of the exciting features of blockchain technology are immutability, distributed ledger technology, peer-to-peer network, and consensus mechanisms. Blockchain applications include IoT, supply chain, finance institutions, and e-governance. Blockchain technology is emerging in the health care applications for maintaining electronic healthcare records to improve the accuracy of diagnosis. Privacy is more important in health care systems, especially for electronic medical records. Here, privacy is defined in two ways, i.e. user privacy and data privacy. For user privacy, the anonymity of the user is very important as it defines that no one can find who the user is and who is the validator. But, user anonymity is not maintained in the existing systems. Hence, the proposed model provides a novel solution for privacy-preserving of electronic medical records. The proposed architecture implements group signatures for providing privacy-preserving to the electronic medical records. Using group signatures also avoids problems like Unforgeability, Anonymity, Traceability, and Unlinkability.