Blockchains in the Healthcare Sector: Comparison
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With the development of Internet of Things (IoT) technologies, industries such as healthcare have started using low-powered sensor-based devices. Because IoT devices are typically low-powered, they are susceptible to cyber intrusions. As an emerging information security solution, blockchain technology has considerable potential for protecting low-powered IoT end devices. Blockchain technology provides promising security features such as cryptography, hash functions, time stamps, and a distributed ledger function. Therefore, blockchain technology can be a robust security technology for securing IoT low-powered devices.

  • blockchain
  • low-powered wireless sensor networks
  • IoT
  • scalability

1. Introduction

The Internet of Things (IoT) connects sensors, actuators, processes and people using low-powered networks and devices with a reliance on single-board computers and microcontrollers [1]. Blockchain technology is a security solution that has developed significantly over the last decade. With the modern developments of IoT technologies and blockchain technology, researchers have suggested that blockchain technology holds potential security capabilities to protect IoT end devices [2]. However, the integration of blockchain and IoT technologies raises a number of research issues, including blockchain network scalability [3].
IoT end devices are low-powered devices that generate sensor data and transmit over a network [4]. Network scalability refers to the ability of the blockchain network to accommodate a number of IoT devices and blockchain network traffic while maintaining the optimal network performance [4].
With the development of blockchain and wireless sensor networks, the network scalability of low-powered blockchain sensor networks is a critical consideration for expanding the network [5]. Our interest in blockchain for low-powered devices came about as a result of our work in IoT for healthcare. In one of the systems wresearchers worked on for healthcare, patients and their families may access a blockchain network to keep track of their relatives [5]. This can give rise to a significant issue, namely that the blockchain network generates a high volume of network traffic and causes a network failure [6]. However, blockchain use over low-powered sensor networks has great potential in other areas, such as energy production, vehicular networking, and other IoT applications [7].
Although there are promising security features of blockchain technology, scalability is still a key barrier when it comes to their implementation across wireless low-powered sensor networks. Blockchain network throughput, bandwidth, hash rate, latency, and data transaction rate are major aspects of a scalable blockchain network [7]. Understanding how the performance of different blockchains changes as the number of nodes increases is important. WResearchers explore this issue using an experimental test bed that runs three of the most popular blockchain algorithms [6].
Although blockchains provide security benefits, as most IoT networks are low-powered, the integration of blockchain technology may decrease network performance efficiency and cause unnecessary scalability issues. An increment in data transmission latency or data loss due to the increment of blockchain network users can create significant consequences, including a reduction in Quality of Service (QoS) [8]. Also, unnecessary latency of sensitive data transactions or data loss in healthcare may put lives at risk. As most IoT networks use wireless technologies for data transmission, bandwidth usage is also another key challenge [8]. Blockchains transmit data as a chain of blocks, and the bandwidth usage of blockchain networks may be higher compared to other peer-to-peer networks. Blockchain networks may require additional bandwidth capacity, and the higher usage of bandwidth may limit the network access for users [8].

2. Blockchain Technology

1. Public Blockchain Networks

2.1. Public Blockchain Networks

Public blockchain networks are open and permissionless networks that anybody can access without approval. Permissionless blockchain networks have no central authority and provide full transparency of block transactions. The blockchain networks that are open to the public are known as permissionless blockchain networks [12][9]. Users have the ability to read, write, or modify transactions based on their needs. These particular types of blockchain networks are self-governed blockchains and enable users to utilize security measures like encryption, timestamps, anonymity, and hashes [11][10].

2.2. Private Blockchain Networks

Private blockchains are permissioned and restricted networks where participation is tightly controlled. These private blockchain networks provide limited blockchain services to users and are often used by organizations to maintain information privacy. User access is given only to validated and authenticated users [12][9]. Permissioned blockchain networks are another term for private blockchain networks. Moreover, chosen or authenticated users can only access the shared ledger [11][10].

2.3. Hybrid Blockchain Networks

Hybrid blockchain networks consist of the features of both private and public blockchain networks. Hybrid blockchain networks allow access to public users while maintaining restricted blockchain services [13][11]. Hybrid blockchain networks offer flexible and customizable blockchain services compared to private and public blockchain networks [13][11]. In the next section, wresearchers discuss the use of blockchain technology in healthcare.

3. Blockchain Technology in Healthcare

As an emerging information security solution, blockchain technology can potentially protect various industries’ sensitive data and end devices, including healthcare [10][12]. Blockchain technology provides a wide range of security functions and applications that helps to protect the healthcare sector from cyber intrusions, such as cryptography, hash function, anonymity, and digital signatures [14][13]. With the development of smart healthcare systems, the healthcare industry started using low-powered IoT smart devices to collect medical information and store health records [14][13]. As IoT devices are low-powered, sensitive medical information can be susceptible to cyber intrusions. The healthcare sector is looking for a robust information security solution, and blockchain technology can be a successful solution [7]. The healthcare sector also faces privacy issues, data corruption, theft of sensitive medical information and physical device damages, which can cause extreme consequences to lives [13][11]. Apart from these, the healthcare sector also faces data overload concerns, as IoT medical devices collect and process a lot of medical data. Data overload may cause bottlenecks in healthcare applications and data transmission. Also, as healthcare data are highly sensitive, there may be concerns with third-party integrated protocols [14][13]. With increasing cyber security threats, third-party protocols may raise privacy concerns and information theft. Healthcare is a critical sector that deals with human lives, and data leakage or corruption may put lives at risk. Therefore, healthcare systems follow global standards. However, IoT systems still face global standardization concerns due to the ambiguity of ownership. The integration of multiple IoT devices becomes challenging in healthcare for standardization procedures [14][13]. Similarly, the integration of various devices can impede the adoption of IoT in the healthcare sector. This obstacle arises from the fact that the manufacturers of these devices have yet to establish a common framework for creating communication protocols and standards [15][14]. This concern also may cause data-protection concerns in healthcare. Most IoT smart devices use wireless connectivity as the primary data-transmission technology. The wireless connectivity uses primary data security features such as data encryption. However, due to the increment of cyber threats, wireless technologies are more prone to cyber threats, including packet sniffing, Wi-Fi jamming, encryption cracking, and Wi-Fi phishing [15][14]. Concerning these cyber security threats, blockchain technology offers enhanced security features that promise the protection of data transmission technologies. However, as blockchains use a variety of security and privacy protection features such as anonymity, cryptography, and hash functions, the respective concerns, including privacy, can be addressed. Also, blockchains use ledgers to store block transaction records that can be used for audit purposes [16][15]. Blockchain technology can be operated for a wide range of networking purposes, such as medical data collection, digitalized patient tracking, and Ambient Assisted Living Systems [16][15]. Blockchain technology provides an additional security layer on network connections, IoT end devices, and user accounts [17][16]. Most blockchain platforms are open-source, providing legal licenses to customize as per requirements [17][16]. Blockchain researchers can use these open-source blockchain platforms to develop numerous automated blockchain applications for commercial purposes. However, the integration of blockchain technology and low-powered IoT healthcare-based wireless networks can be challenging due to scalability limitations [17][16]. Blockchains typically require high network bandwidth, and the limitations of particular blockchain networks can increase the latency while decreasing the block transactions [17][16].

References

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  2. Dharani, A.; Khaliq-ur-Rehman Raazi, S.M. Integrating Blockchain with IoT for Mitigating Cyber Threat In Corporate Environment. In Proceedings of the 2022 Mohammad Ali Jinnah University International Conference on Computing (MAJICC), Karachi, Pakistan, 27–28 October 2022; pp. 1–6.
  3. Alazzawi, L.; Elkateeb, A. Performance Evaluation of the WSN Routing Protocols Scalability. J. Comput. Syst. Netw. Commun. 2008, 2008, 481046.
  4. de Brito Gonçalves, J.P.; Spelta, G.; da Silva Villaça, R.; Gomes, R.L. IoT Data Storage on a Blockchain Using Smart Contracts and IPFS. In Proceedings of the 2022 IEEE International Conference on Blockchain (Blockchain), Espoo, Finland, 22–25 August 2022; pp. 508–511.
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  6. Roman, V.; Ordieres-Mere, J. IoT Blockchain Technologies for Smart Sensors Based on Raspberry Pi. In Proceedings of the 2018 IEEE 11th Conference on Service-Oriented Computing and Applications (SOCA), Paris, France, 20–22 November 2018; pp. 216–220.
  7. Forkan, A.R.M.; Branch, P.; Jayaraman, P.P.; Ferretto, A. An Internet-of-Things Solution to Assist Independent Living and Social Connectedness in Elderly. Trans. Soc. Comput. 2019, 2, 14.
  8. Tahir, M.; Sardaraz, M.; Muhammad, S.; Saud Khan, M. A Lightweight Authentication and Authorization Framework for Blockchain-Enabled IoT Network in Health-Informatics. Sustainability 2020, 12, 6960.
  9. Wang, X.; Zha, X.; Ni, W.; Liu, R.P.; Guo, Y.J.; Niu, X.; Zheng, K. Survey on blockchain for Internet of Things. Comput. Commun. 2019, 136, 10–29.
  10. Huang, Z.; Su, X.; Zhang, Y.; Shi, C.; Zhang, H.; Xie, L. A Decentralized Solution for IoT Data Trusted Exchange Based-on Blockchain. In Proceedings of the 3rd IEEE International Conference on Computer and Communications, Chengdu, China, 13–16 December 2017.
  11. She, W.; Liu, Q.; Tian, Z.; Chen, J.-S.; Wang, B.; Liu, W. Blockchain Trust Model for Malicious Node Detection in Wireless Sensor Networks. IEEE Access 2019, 7, 38947–38956.
  12. Yiyang, C.; Takashio, K. A Floating Calculation Revamp For the Ethereum Blockchain-Based IoT Systems. In Proceedings of the 2022 IEEE 8th World Forum on Internet of Things (WF-IoT), Yokohama, Japan, 26 October–11 November 2022; pp. 1–6.
  13. Kabir, R.; Hasan, A.S.M.T.; Islam, M.R.; Watanobe, Y. A Blockchain-based Approach to Secure Cloud Connected IoT Devices. In Proceedings of the 2021 International Conference on Information and Communication Technology for Sustainable Development (ICICT4SD), Dhaka, Bangladesh, 27–28 February 2021; pp. 366–370.
  14. Moinet, A.; Darties, B.; Baril, J.-L. Blockchain based trust & authentication for decentralized sensor networks. arXiv 2017, arXiv:1706.01730.
  15. Panarello, A.; Tapas, N.; Merlino, G.; Longo, F.; Puliafito, A. Blockchain and IoT Integration: A Systematic Survey. Sensors 2018, 18, 2575.
  16. Liang, X.; Shetty, S.; Tosh, D.; Bowden, D.; Njilla, L.; Kamhoua, C. Towards Blockchain Empowered Trusted and Accountable Data Sharing and Collaboration in Mobile Healthcare Applications. EAI Endorsed Trans. Pervasive Health Technol. 2018, 4, e3.
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