Ensuring Improved Security in Medical Data Using ECC and Blockchain Technology with Edge Devices

Abstract

Hospital data management is one of the functional parts of operations to store and access healthcare data. Nowadays, protecting these from hacking is one of the most difficult tasks in the healthcare system. As the user's data collected in the field of healthcare is very sensitive, adequate security measures have to be taken in this field to protect the networks. To maintain security, an effective encryption technology must be utilised. This paper focuses on implementing the elliptic curve cryptography (ECC) technique, a lightweight authentication approach to share the data effectively. Many researches are in place to share the data wirelessly, among which this work uses Electronic Medical Card (EMC) to store the healthcare data. The work discusses two important data security issues: data authentication and data confidentiality. To ensure data authentication, the proposed system employs a secure mechanism to encrypt and decrypt the data with a 512-bit key. Data confidentiality is ensured by using the Blockchain ledger technique which allows ethical users to access the data. Finally, the encrypted data is stored on the edge device. The edge computing technology is used to store the medical reports within the edge network to access the data in a very fast manner. An authenticated user can decrypt the data and process the data at optimum speed. After processing, the updated data is stored in the Blockchain and in the cloud server. This proposed method ensures secure maintenance and efficient retrieval of medical data and reports.