On the Design of Blockchain-Based Access Control Protocol for IoT-Enabled Healthcare Applications

Access control is one of the important security services that is essential for an Internet of Things (IoT)-enabled authorized user using his/her smart mobile device to authenticate with the trusted Hospital Authority (HA) in a hospital. After mutual authentication, a secret key is established among the user and HA for secure data transmission. The secure data (transactions) gathered by the HA from the users in the hospital is encrypted using a shared key among various trusted hospital authorities involved in the private blockchain network of hospitals. The HA of each hospital is responsible for constructing the blocks in the blockchain using the encrypted transactions because the data in healthcare application is treated as confidential and private. To deal with this important problem, we design a novel access control scheme using private blockchain technology. The proposed scheme is shown to be secure against various well-known attacks. Moreover, the proposed scheme provides better security and functionality features, and also requires low communication and computational costs as compared to relevant approaches.