Patient-centered cross-enterprise document sharing and dynamic consent framework using consortium blockchain and ciphertext-policy attribute-based encryption

Patient-centered cross-enterprise document sharing and dynamic consent framework using consortium blockchain and ciphertext-policy attribute-based encryption
Research Article
Liang Zhang, Haibin Kan, Honglan Huang
Proceedings of the 19th ACM International Conference on Computing Frontiers, 17 May 2022; pp 58–66
Abstract
Patient-centered healthcare data sharing and data usage consent are gaining popularity. Cross-enterprise document sharing (XDS) is the crucial system of sharing personalized healthcare data. Furthermore, dynamic consent is vital to the XDS system, because it respects people’s autonomy and achieves recognition of data sovereignty. Because of its transparency, blockchain is a powerful system for managing storage and computing without a trusted third party. Besides, ciphertext-policy attribute-based encryption (CP-ABE) extends public-key encryption by implying access control policies in ciphertexts, making it suitable for protecting the privacy of individual healthcare data in versatile cases. Particularly, we use hospital name, “date” and “department” as attribute strings in the access control policies. Consequently, based on consortium blockchain and CP-ABE, we propose a patient-centered XDS and a dynamic consent framework. Compared with previous related literature, we make the proposed framework consistent with current practices and achieve favorable criteria, such as data confidentiality, data recoverability and time-aware ciphertext. Further, we conduct comprehensive experiments to show the feasibility and practicality.