BSAS: blockchain-based shareable authentication scheme for smart healthcare.

Nowadays, research efforts are strongly directed toward integrating Blockchain into Smart Healthcare Systems to achieve distribution, transparency, and immutability within the system. The IoT-based Healthcare System incorporates numerous Smart Devices to gather extensive data. The Hospital Authority collects this vital information for diverse analyses via an intermediary data collector. The healthcare data is very crucial and requires secure data transmission from Smart Devices to the Hospital Authority to prevent unauthorized access. The traditional authentication scheme faces challenges such as a single point failure, heavy reliance on the Trusted Third Party, and the absence of channel communication. This can increase the computational load and system latency. The proposed solution introduces the Blockchain-based Shareable Authentication Scheme (BSAS) for Smart Healthcare. The BSAS scheme leverages a Consortium Blockchain which is implemented by using Hyperledger Fabric that supports channel communication among different hospital departments. This eliminates the burden of repetitive registration across all departments and reduces computational overhead. Moreover, a mutual authentication and key agreement scheme employing lightweight operations ensures the secure transmission of data from smart devices to the hospital authorities. The formal analysis using the ROR model and informal analysis confirm the security of the BSAS scheme. Additionally, formal simulations with the Scyther tool reveal no attacks within the bounds. The evaluation of performance using Hyperledger Caliper indicates a consistent and maximum throughput of 100 transactions per second for read operations or an increasing trend for certain operations with a rise in transaction count. The latency remains consistently minimal for read operations and is below 6.5 s for other operations. This comprehensive analysis underscores that the scheme is resilient to various attacks, has computational efficiency, and additional security enhancements, including data immutability, confidential communication through channels, and a distributed system. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]