Enhancing Hospital Data Security: A Blockchain-Based Protocol for Secure Information Sharing and Recovery

Abstract

Hospitals that store sensitive patient medical records have recently faced issues such as the inability to recover medical data and breaches of patient privacy due to hacker attacks. These attacks on medical data often involve ransomware, which obfuscates the entire hospital’s data, making them inaccessible, and can also occur when hospitals share patient information during transfers of care. In this study, we propose a new authentication protocol to prevent and address such issues within hospital systems. The proposed protocol encrypts medical records on a private blockchain, allowing them to be securely shared among institutions, hospitals, and insurance companies, ensuring data recovery even if a ransomware attack paralyzes the server. Additionally, the protocol facilitates the systematic sharing of patient medical records between hospitals or between hospitals and insurance companies by distributing session keys. In this study, we demonstrate that the proposed protocol provides 11 security properties, including forward and backward secrecy, user untraceability, and resistance to replay attacks. We also evaluate the communication and computational costs, proving that the protocol is feasible for practical use.