A Security Model of Multihospital FHIR Database Authorization Based on Secret Sharing and Blockchain

Abstract

Secret sharing (SS) is a threshold technology that shares a secret value by generating and distributing${n}$shares in the way that a set of any${k}$shares can recover the secret. On the other hand, blockchain is a decentralized system establishing a secure data structure for storing data in the form of a hash chain. Combining SS and blockchain is definitely a promising paradigm in the data security field. Recently, the fast healthcare interoperability resources (FHIRs) standard is defined for medical data exchange across various medical institutions. In this article, we combine SS, ElGamal’s encryption/decryption, and blockchain to propose a multihospital FHIR database authorization (MFDA). To achieve a secure MFDA, the group-based SS (GSS) and the notion using GSS on exponent (referred to as EGSS) are proposed. The secrets of GSS and EGSS have the discrete logarithm problem (DLP) relation, on which the secrets can be used as ElGamal’s private key and public key, respectively. Also, their shares will have DLP relation. By uploading public shares of EGSS on blockchain and using private shares of GSS in a private network, we can recover ElGamal’s public key from a deployed smart contract on blockchain and recover ElGamal’s private key from a qualified set. Meantime, when recovering private key, the private shares of GSS can be authenticated by public shares on blockchain to check tampering and corrupted of private shares during the communication in a private network. Theorems, examples, and experiments demonstrate that the proposed MFDA has efficient and secure database authorization.