CoviBlock: A Secure Blockchain-Based Smart Healthcare Assisting System

Bhaskara S. Egala, Ashok K. Pradhan, Shubham Gupta, Kshira Sagar Sahoo, Muhammad Bilal () and Kyung-Sup Kwak ()
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Bhaskara S. Egala: Department of Computer Science and Engineering, SRM University, Andhra Pradesh 522240, India
Ashok K. Pradhan: Department of Computer Science and Engineering, SRM University, Andhra Pradesh 522240, India
Shubham Gupta: Department of Computer Science and Engineering, SRM University, Andhra Pradesh 522240, India
Kshira Sagar Sahoo: Department of Computer Science and Engineering, SRM University, Andhra Pradesh 522240, India
Muhammad Bilal: Department of computer Engineering, Hankuk University of Foreign Studies, Yongin-si 17035, Republic of Korea
Kyung-Sup Kwak: Department of Information and Communications Engineering, Inha University, Incheon 22212, Republic of Korea

Sustainability, 2022, vol. 14, issue 24, 1-21

Abstract: The recent COVID-19 pandemic has underlined the significance of digital health record management systems for pandemic mitigation. Existing smart healthcare systems (SHSs) fail to preserve system-level medical record openness and privacy while including mitigating measures such as testing, tracking, and treating (3T). In addition, current centralised compute architectures are susceptible to denial of service assaults because of DDoS or bottleneck difficulties. In addition, these current SHSs are susceptible to leakage of sensitive data, unauthorised data modification, and non-repudiation. In centralised models of the current system, a third party controls the data, and data owners may not have total control over their data. The Coviblock, a novel, decentralised, blockchain-based smart healthcare assistance system, is proposed in this study to support medical record privacy and security in the pandemic mitigation process without sacrificing system usability. The Coviblock ensures system-level openness and trustworthiness in the administration and use of medical records. Edge computing and the InterPlanetary File System (IPFS) are recommended as part of a decentralised distributed storage system (DDSS) to reduce the latency and the cost of data operations on the blockchain (IPFS). Using blockchain ledgers, the DDSS ensures system-level transparency and event traceability in the administration of medical records. A distributed, decentralised resource access control mechanism (DDRAC) is also proposed to guarantee the secrecy and privacy of DDSS data. To confirm the Coviblock’s real-time behaviour on an Ethereum test network, a prototype of the technology is constructed and examined. To demonstrate the benefits of the proposed system, we compare it to current cloud-based health cyber–physical systems (H-CPSs) with blockchain. According to the experimental research, the Coviblock maintains the same level of security and privacy as existing H-CPSs while performing considerably better. Lastly, the suggested system greatly reduces latency in operations, such as 32 milliseconds (ms) to produce a new record, 29 ms to update vaccination data, and 27 ms to validate a given certificate through the DDSS.

Keywords: digital medical records; blockchain; privacy; security; pandemic mitigation; smart healthcare systems (search for similar items in EconPapers)
JEL-codes: O13 Q Q0 Q2 Q3 Q5 Q56 (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2022
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