Blockchain-Enabled Privacy-Preserving Access Control for Data Publishing and Sharing in the Internet of Medical Things

Recently, the rapid developments in the Internet of Medical Things (IoMT) enable smart devices to generate and transmit massive personal electronic medical records (EMRs). However, there are many sensitive attributes in an EMR, which could be accessed by external or internal unauthorized users for malicious purposes. In this article, we present a triple subject purpose-based access control (TS-PBAC) model, which is compatible with a blockchain-enabled reliable transaction network, and design an individual-centric security and privacy-preserving mechanism for access control with different purposes and roles in IoMT scenarios. Specifically, we design hierarchical purpose tree (HPT) and related policies to guarantee the legality of an external user with different purposes. To improve the privacy for sensitive attributes against an internal attacker, we design a local differential privacy (LDP)-based policy and role-based access control scheme in an edge computing paradigm to grant fine-granularity rights for authorized users. In addition, we introduce mutual evaluation metrics to evaluate data quality from a patient-and-medical-service level in an open anonymous network, only using logs kept in the blockchain. We test our approach by real-world EMRs with 100000 patients. The experimental results show that the proposed privacy-preserving scheme can better protect patient’s privacy than traditional access control policies in IoMT environments, and can make reliable and stable access control decisions between data publishers and data requesters with different purposes.