Protection of Electronic Health Records (EHRs) on the Ethereum Blockchain: Identifying and Preventing Active Threats to Smart Contracts

Abstract

Technology enhancement through blockchain in the healthcare sector is lately increased for ehealth solutions.Due to its decentralised nature and reliability, blockchain has shown to have significant potential in various e-health businesses, including the secure transfer of patient electronic health records (EHRs) across different healthcare beneficiaries.The proposed Ethereum blockchain based on patient-centric architecture gives complete freedom to patients to access private data and preserves rights to share that data with other entities of the system.This article mainly focuses on building a secure Ethereum blockchain (EBC) based healthcare data security system and reducing execution gas costs for proposed attacks on the system.IPFS off-chain storage helps to address the blockchain's scalability problem.Two different attacks have been tested on the proposed system with reference to execution time for attacks.This article also proposed countermeasures for these tested attacks and the system ultimately plays an important role in sharing sensitive healthcare data.