Blockchain-Based Access Control Mechanism for IoT Medical Data

With the proliferation of medical Internet of Things (IoT) devices that collects sensitive healthcare data, access control is more crucial than ever to ensure medical IoT data from unauthorized use. The security and privacy of medical records must be addressed rigorously. The security protocols and distributed system architecture are designed for effectively implementing the access control mechanisms to prevent privacy leakage and insecure data sharing. Blockchain is a promising candidate for strengthening the security and privacy needs of IoT medical systems. This paper proposes a blockchain-based access control mechanism for IoT medical data. Medical IoT data can be encrypted and stored off-chain in a distributed file storage system. Data access transactions only record the address of the data ciphertext and the encryption-key ciphertext into the blocks, which can significantly improve the scalability of the blockchain and strengthen privacy protection of medical data. The immutable nature of blockchain ensures the integrity and authenticity of medical data. Our BAC-IOMT scheme embeds the access policies into smart contracts to execute data access control mechanism. Finally, this scheme is proven to be secure and its performance efficiency, data volume and delay are analyzed in detail, the experimental results show that it is efficient and feasible.