Fusion of machine learning and blockchain-based privacy-preserving approach for healthcare data in the Internet of Things

Abstract

In recent years, the rapid integration of Internet of Things (IoT) devices into the healthcare sector has brought about revolutionary advancements in patient care and data management. While these technological innovations hold immense promise, they concurrently raise critical security concerns, particularly in safeguarding medical data against potential cyber threats. The sensitive nature of health-related information requires robust measures to ensure patient data's confidentiality, integrity, and availability within IoT-enabled medical environments. Addressing the imperative need for enhanced security in IoT-based healthcare systems, we propose a comprehensive method encompassing three distinct phases. In the first phase, we implement blockchain-enabled request and transaction encryption to fortify the security of data transactions, providing an immutable and transparent framework. Subsequently, in the second phase, we introduce request pattern recognition check, leveraging diverse data sources to identify and thwart potential unauthorized access attempts. Finally, the third phase incorporates feature selection and the BiLSTM network to enhance the accuracy and efficiency of intrusion detection through advanced machine-learning techniques. We compared the simulation results of the proposed method with three recent related methods, namely AIBPSF-IoMT, OMLIDS-PBIoT, and AIMMFIDS. The evaluation criteria encompass detection rates, false alarm rates, precision, recall, and accuracy, crucial benchmarks in assessing the overall performance of intrusion detection systems. Notably, our findings reveal that the proposed method outperforms these existing methods across all evaluated criteria, underscoring its superiority in enhancing the security posture of IoT-based healthcare systems.