TY - JOUR
T1 - Protecting IoT-Enabled Healthcare Data at the Edge: Integrating Blockchain, AES, and Off-Chain Decentralized Storage
AU - Mohanta, Bhabendu Kumar
AU - Awad, Ali Ismail
AU - Dehury, Mohan Kumar
AU - Mohapatra, Hitesh
AU - Khan, Muhammad Khurram
N1 - Publisher Copyright:
© 2014 IEEE.
PY - 2025
Y1 - 2025
N2 - 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 paper, 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 health-care 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 seconds, throughput of 0.11 Mbps, 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.
AB - 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 paper, 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 health-care 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 seconds, throughput of 0.11 Mbps, 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.
KW - AES encryption
KW - blockchain
KW - data protection
KW - edge computing
KW - Internet of Things
KW - Smart healthcare
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U2 - 10.1109/JIOT.2025.3528894
DO - 10.1109/JIOT.2025.3528894
M3 - Article
AN - SCOPUS:85215244426
SN - 2327-4662
JO - IEEE Internet of Things Journal
JF - IEEE Internet of Things Journal
ER -