Decentralized Electronic Health Records Management via Redactable Blockchain and Revocable IPFS

The increasing integration of the Internet of Health Things (IoHT) in the eHealth sector has significantly advanced the collection of Electronic Health Records (EHR). While blockchain technology offers enhanced data integrity and traceability for EHR, its inherent immutability often clashes with user concerns regarding security and privacy and prevents records from being securely updated. To address these challenges, our paper presents an innovative redactable blockchain mechanism tailored for EHR management. This approach leverages a decentralized, attribute-based chameleon hash function, enabling transaction-level redactions without succumbing to the vulnerabilities of a single point of failure. We implemented the proposed system based on the Charm cryptographic library and revocable IPFS scheme. The Chameleon hash function can support redactable operation for on-chain EHR-related information in seconds level. We also conducted extensive experiments on blockchain performance and IPFS performance, highlighting that the proposed redactable blockchain is efficient in practice for EHR management.