Design of efficient storage and retrieval of medical records in blockchain based on InterPlanetary File System and modified bloom tree

Abstract

AbstractIn the healthcare sector, medical records contain sensitive information about patients, so guaranteeing the confidentiality and integrity of it is essential. To improve the security of it, blockchain technology is being utilized. The blockchain is a type of distributed ledger and it keeps data securely while also generating trust without the need of third party. It has data storage constraint and Merkle tree preserves data integrity but it is inefficient when searching transactions within it. Hence this paper describes InterPlanetary File System (IPFS) based storage and modified bloom tree data structure which is a hybridization of bloom filter and Merkle tree for efficient searching. To protect data privacy, initially it encrypts medical records using ciphertext policy‐attribute based encryption and then the data stored on IPFS returns a hash value. To diminish the false positive rate (FPR), the hash returned by IPFS is stored in two parts of the bloom filter. The first part stores the data by using “k” non‐cryptographic hash function and second part stores the transformed data with the same hash function. The bloom tree is created using Merkle proof for verification of medical record in blockchain. The experiments show that the proposed method reduces the FPR rate and searching complexity is O(log2).