Novel model to authenticate role-based medical users for blockchain-based IoMT devices

• Published in: PloS one 2024-07, Vol.19 (7), p.e0304774
• Main Authors: Aslam, Muhammad Shehzad, Altaf, Ayesha, Iqbal, Faiza, Nigar, Natasha, Galán, Juan Castanedo, Aray, Daniel Gavilanes, Díez, Isabel de la Torre, Ashraf, Imran
• Format: Article
• Language: English
• Subjects: Access control; Authentication; Biology and Life Sciences; Blockchain; Computer and Information Sciences; Computer Security; Confidentiality; Cybersecurity; Engineering and Technology; Health care; Humans; Internet of medical things; Internet of Things; Investment analysis; Latency; Legalization; Medical devices; Medical electronics; Medical equipment; Medical personnel; Medical research; Medicine and Health Sciences; Medicine, Experimental; Methods; Network latency; Patients; People and Places; Physical Sciences; Physiological apparatus; Privacy; Remote monitoring; Remote sensors; Research and Analysis Methods; Safety and security measures; Sensors; Technology application; Telemedicine; User statistics
• ISSN: 1932-6203; 1932-6203
• DOI: 10.1371/journal.pone.0304774

The IoT (Internet of Things) has played a promising role in e-healthcare applications during the last decade. Medical sensors record a variety of data and transmit them over the IoT network to facilitate remote patient monitoring. When a patient visits a hospital he may need to connect or disconnect medical devices from the medical healthcare system frequently. Also, multiple entities (e.g., doctors, medical staff, etc.) need access to patient data and require distinct sets of patient data. As a result of the dynamic nature of medical devices, medical users require frequent access to data, which raises complex security concerns. Granting access to a whole set of data creates privacy issues. Also, each of these medical user need to grant access rights to a specific set of medical data, which is quite a tedious task. In order to provide role-based access to medical users, this study proposes a blockchain-based framework for authenticating multiple entities based on the trust domain to reduce the administrative burden. This study is further validated by simulation on the infura blockchain using solidity and Python. The results demonstrate that role-based authorization and multi-entities authentication have been implemented and the owner of medical data can control access rights at any time and grant medical users easy access to a set of data in a healthcare system. The system has minimal latency compared to existing blockchain systems that lack multi-entity authentication and role-based authorization.