Blockchain for Access Control in e-Health Scenarios

TL;DR

This paper proposes using a consortium blockchain to enhance access control in e-Health systems, ensuring policy integrity, auditability, and scalability across multiple facilities.

Contribution

It introduces a blockchain-based approach to improve policy sharing and integrity in e-Health access control systems, addressing faults in current solutions.

Findings

Ensures policy integrity and auditability across facilities.

Maintains scalability and authenticity of access policies.

Provides a fault-tolerant system for e-Health data access control.

Abstract

Access control is a crucial part of a system's security, restricting what actions users can perform on resources. Therefore, access control is a core component when dealing with e-Health data and resources, discriminating which is available for a certain party. We consider that current systems that attempt to assure the share of policies between facilities are prone to system's and network's faults and do not assure the integrity of policies lifecycle. By approaching this problem with the use of a distributed ledger, namely a consortium blockchain, where the operations are stored as transactions, we ensure that the different facilities have knowledge about all the parties that can act over the e-Health resources while maintaining integrity, auditability, authenticity, and scalability.