Securing e-health records using keyless signature infrastructure blockchain technology in the cloud

Health record maintenance and sharing are one of the essential tasks in the healthcare system. In this system, loss of confidentiality leads to a passive impact on the security of health record whereas loss of integrity leads can have a serious impact such as loss of a patient's life. Therefore, it is of prime importance to secure electronic health records. Health records are represented by Fast Healthcare Interoperability Resources standards and managed by Health Level Seven International Healthcare Standards Organization. Centralized storage of health data is attractive to cyber-attacks and constant viewing of patient records is challenging. Therefore, it is necessary to design a system using the cloud that helps to ensure authentication and that also provides integrity to health records. The keyless signature infrastructure used in the proposed system for ensuring the secrecy of digital signatures also ensures aspects of authentication. Furthermore, data integrity is managed by the proposed blockchain technology. The performance of the proposed framework is evaluated by comparing the parameters like average time, size, and cost of data storage and retrieval of the blockchain technology with conventional data storage techniques. The results show that the response time of the proposed system with the blockchain technology is almost 50% shorter than the conventional techniques. Also they express the cost of storage is about 20% less for the system with blockchain in comparison with the existing techniques.