BSFR-SH: Blockchain-Enabled Security Framework Against Ransomware Attacks for Smart Healthcare

Ransomware is a type of malicious program or software that encrypts the contents on a hard disc and prevents the users from accessing them unless they pay an amount (called a ransom). Most of the organizations, such as financial institutes and healthcare sectors (i.e., smart healthcare) are targeted by ransomware attacks. Ransomware assaults are among the most frightening types of cyber-attacks, and they are not confined to a specific sector or the countries. Blockchain is a tamper-proof technology, which is more secure, robust and decentralized in nature. Features of blockchain can add more security for detection and mitigation of ransomware more effectively. In this paper, we propose a new blockchain-enabled security framework to detect and defend the ransomware attacks for smart healthcare (in short, BSFR-SH). The conducted security analysis proves the security of the proposed BSFR-SH against the ransomware attacks. The performance of BSFR-SH is significantly better than the other similar existing mechanisms as it achieves better accuracy and F1-score than other compared mechanisms. Furthermore, the practical demonstration of BSFR-SH is provided to estimate the impact on important performance parameters.