Towards design and implementation of security and privacy framework for Internet of Medical Things (IoMT) by leveraging blockchain and IPFS technology

• Published in: The Journal of supercomputing Vol. 77; no. 8; pp. 7916 - 7955
• Main Authors: Kumar, Randhir, Tripathi, Rakesh
• Format: Journal Article
• Language: English
• Published: New York Springer US 01.08.2021; Springer Nature B.V
• Subjects: Authentication; Blockchain; Clusters; Compilers; Computer Science; Consortia; Contracts; Cryptography; Data storage; Health care; Internet of medical things; Interpreters; Medical electronics; Medical equipment; Privacy; Processor Architectures; Programming Languages; Security; Smart contract; IPFS; Blockchain; IoMT
• ISSN: 0920-8542; 1573-0484
• DOI: 10.1007/s11227-020-03570-x

The Internet of Medical Things (IoMT) is the next frontier in the digital revolution and it leverages IoT in the healthcare domain. The underlying technology has changed the current healthcare system by collecting real-time data of patients and providing a patient motioning system. But IoMT also presents a big challenge for data storage management, security, and privacy due to cloud-based storage. Today, this large volume of IoMT generated medical data is stored in the centralized storage system. However, centralization of patient sensitive information leads to a single point of failure, privacy, and security concern. To address these issues, we propose a smart contracts enabled consortium blockchain network. We integrated interplanetary file systems (IPFS) cluster node where smart contracts are deployed at the initial stage for authentication of patient’s and medical devices, the same cluster layer is also proposed as a distributed data storage layer for device-generated data after authentication and these data are securely transmitted over the consortium blockchain. The IPFS cluster node ensures the security and authentication of the devices and it also provides secure storage management in IoMT enabled healthcare system. The consortium network enables the privacy of data owing to hash-based storage in a block of IoMT enabled healthcare network.