A Reliable and Secure Permissioned Blockchain-Assisted Data Transfer Mechanism in Healthcare-Based Cyber-Physical Systems

Healthcare systems are highly sensitive to cyberattacks as these systems possess most of the sensitive information compared to other systems relying on internet facilities. Due to the stronger security merits and efficiency of blockchain, it is integrated with the healthcare sector to ensure reliable data transfer. However, to improve the reliability and efficiency of the integrated system, a permissioned blockchain-based security framework combining several techniques is proposed. To enable storing and validating blocks containing medical data on the blockchain, the miner is administered using the delegated proof of stake (DPoS) consensus protocol. This protocol is efficient in choosing the miner from the list of participants. Then, the blocks are created using recursive indexing with an Even-Rodeh (RI-ER) coding hashing scheme. This algorithm is an indexing scheme that is much more efficient than the normal hashing algorithms. The validation process is carried out by the miner using the hash values provided to the users. By using the kidney disease dataset from Kaggle, the performance of the proposed method is evaluated. The performance analysis proved the effectiveness of the proposed approach compared to other schemes.