Privacy-Preserving Solution for Data Sharing in IoT-Based Smart Consumer Electronic Devices for Healthcare

The rapid expansion of cloud computing and the Internet of Things (IoT) has significantly elevated healthcare standards, paving the way for the transformative era of smart consumer devices for healthcare solutions. However, user privacy and data security are key aspects that a smart healthcare system should handle efficiently. Ciphertext policy-based fine-grained search schemes are frequently used standards for ensuring the security and accessibility of the data collected by these devices in a cloud environment. However, in most schemes, attributes and the access policy are sent in an unencrypted form to the third-party cloud server to ensure the authorized access of sensitive health data. It poses a threat to users’ privacy. The cloud server can easily get information about the attributes containing sensitive user information. To ensure attribute privacy, this paper presents a comprehensive architecture that integrates blockchain with IoT devices, detailing the mechanisms for attribute encryption, secure data sharing, and privacy-preserving access controls. The proposed scheme prevents attribute information leakage at both the data owner and the data user ends. Further, it leverages the homomorphic property of the ElGamal encryption to validate the authorized users while ensuring their privacy.