BPPKS: A blockchain-based privacy preserving and keyword-searchable scheme for medical data sharing

Abstract

With the rapid development of medical information technology, the widespread adoption and application of electronic medical data have prompted more and more healthcare institutions to choose to store medical data in cloud servers to facilitate easier sharing. Attribute-based encryption is utilized for sharing electronic medical data to achieve fine-grained access control. However, storing access policies in plaintext can easily expose user privacy. Additionally, during the data sharing process, placing data retrieval in the cloud prevents secure and reliable searches. To address these issues, this paper proposes a blockchain-based privacy preserving and keyword-searchable scheme for medical data sharing(BPPKS). Access policies are transformed into vector-matrix form, concealing attributes within access policies to prevent the leakage of authorized user privacy information. Leveraging blockchain’s transparency, tamper-resistance, and integrity verification features, smart contracts are used for retrieval and verification, enabling secure and reliable data searches while ensuring the integrity of medical data. Simultaneously, some complex decryption operations are delegated to the cloud servers, reducing the decryption load for users to a constant level. Finally, security analysis demonstrates that this scheme can withstand adaptive chosen keyword attacks (IND-CKA), and performance evaluations show higher efficiency in computation and storage aspects.