Blockchain-Based Logging to Defeat Malicious Insiders: The Case of Remote Health Monitoring Systems

IoT-based remote health monitoring is a promising technology to support patients who are unable to travel to medical facilities. Due to the sensitivity of health data, it is important to secure it against all possible threats. While a great deal of work has been done to secure IoT device-cloud communication and health records on the cloud, insider attacks remain a significant challenge. Malicious insiders may tamper, steal or change patients’ health data, which results in a loss of patient trust in these systems. Audit logs in the cloud, which may point to illegal data access, may also be erased or forged by malicious insiders as they tend to have technical knowledge and privileged access to the system. Thus, in this work, we propose a Cloud Access Security Broker (CASB) model that (a) logs every action performed on user data and (b) secures those logs by placing them in a private blockchain that is viewable by the data owners (i.e., patients). Patients can query the blockchain, track their data’s movement, and be alerted if their data has been accessed by an administrator or moved outside the cloud storage. In this work, we practically implement a web application that receives health data from patients, a CASB that securely stores the records in the cloud, and integrate a private blockchain that immediately logs all actions happening in the backend of the web application and CASB. We evaluate the system’s security and performance under varying numbers of patients and actions.