Protecting IoT-Enabled Healthcare Data at the Edge: Integrating Blockchain, AES, and Off-Chain Decentralized Storage

Over the past two decades, the rapid growth of the Internet of Things (IoT) has begun to transform traditional healthcare systems into intelligent systems; however, hospitals have encountered challenges in securely storing patient data within centralized architectures due to their lack of efficiency and security features. Blockchain technology offers a secure and reliable decentralized framework for storing and sharing healthcare data among various stakeholders, including patients, doctors, nurses, insurance companies, and pharmaceutical firms. In this article, we propose a blockchain-based data-protection scheme deployed at edge nodes. The proposed scheme uses the interplanetary file system (IPFS) model to address storage and data-protection issues in an IoT-edge-enabled smart healthcare system. First, the security issues in smart healthcare systems are identified, and the impact of these issues on patient privacy and hospital infrastructure is considered. Then, a technique based on the 128-bit Advanced Encryption Standard is proposed to encrypt patient information and store it in an IPFS-based decentralized network. Edge-computing techniques are used to perform computations at the edge level within a decentralized architecture, thereby addressing the computational challenges associated with cloud computing. Lastly, the encryption keys are stored using blockchain technology to address the issue of restricted computational power on low-end devices through off-chain and on-chain business processes. The experimental results demonstrate that the proposed scheme achieves a key management time of 0.2 ms, file retrieval time of 0.57 s, throughput of 0.11 Mb/s, encryption time of 1.96 ms, and decryption time of 1.91 ms. These findings indicate that the proposed scheme outperforms previously reported approaches with respect to key management time, file retrieval efficiency, and its potential for edge deployment and off-chain capabilities. Consequently, the proposed scheme is highly suited for efficiently securing patient data within IoT-enabled smart healthcare systems.