Blockchain-Enabled decentralized Attribute-Based access control with policy hiding for smart healthcare

Abstract

With the rapid development of edge computing technologies, smart healthcare significantly improves people’s lives by collecting and analyzing health data in real time. However, security and privacy issues impede the wide deployment of smart healthcare systems (SHS). Most of existing solutions still have drawbacks with respect to computation efficiency and users’ privacy. In this paper, a blockchain-enabled attribute-based access control scheme with hidden policies is proposed for SHS. The scheme introduces multiple authorities to avoid single point failure. Especially, the mode of online-offline encryption relieves users’ online computation burden by transferring computation tasks to the idle time of users, and policy hiding protects users’ sensitive information. Furthermore, fair payments are realized based on blockchain and smart contracts to support the outsourcing of decryption between users and mobile edge computing servers. Finally, the proposed scheme is proven secure in the random oracle model, and experimental results show that it is computationally efficient and hence can be used in the edge computing environment.