Authors: Qin Liu, YunLian Liu, Min Luo, Debiao He, Huaqun Wang, Kim-Kwang Raymond Choo

Title: The Security of Blockchain-Based Medical Systems: Research Challenges and Opportunities

Journal: IEEE Systems Journal

Abstract: The current COVID-19 pandemic has, perhaps, expedited the move to electronic medical systems (e.g., telemedicine). However, in the digitalization of healthcare services, we have to ensure the security and privacy of (sensitive) healthcare data, often stored locally in the hospital’s server or remotely within a trusted cloud server. There have been many attempts to design blockchain-based approaches to support security and privacy in such systems, and this is the focus of this paper where we systematically review the existing literature on blockchain-based medical systems. We then categorize the existing security solutions into three categories, namely: (i) decentralized authentication, (ii) access control, (iii) audit and discuss the privacy protection technologies in blockchain-based healthcare systems. Based on our analysis, we identify a number of challenges, including performance limitations and inflexible audit, as well as future research opportunities (e.g., the need for lightweight security schemes for blockchain-based medical systems).