Bonfring International Journal of Software Engineering and Soft Computing, Vol. 9, No.
2, April 2019 43
Block Chain Technology for Privacy Protection for
Cloudlet-based Medical Data Sharing
M. Divya and Dr.G. Singaravel
Abstract--- With the popularity of wearable devices, along
with the development of clouds and cloudlet technology, there
has been increasing need to provide better medical care. The
processing block chain of medical data mainly includes data
collection, data storage and data sharing, etc. Traditional
healthcare system often requires the delivery of medical data
to the cloud, which involves users’ sensitive information and
causes communication energy consumption. Practically,
medical data sharing is a critical and challenging issue. Thus
in this paper, we build up a novel healthcare system by
utilizing the flexibility of cloudlet. The functions of cloudlet
include privacy protection, data sharing and intrusion
detection. In the stage of data collection, we first utilize
Number Theory Research Unit (NTRU) method to encrypt
user’s body data collected by wearable devices. Those data
will be transmitted to nearby cloudlet in an energy efficient
fashion. Secondly, we present a new trust model to help users
to select trustable partners who want to share stored data in
the cloudlet. The trust model also helps similar patients to
communicate with each other about their diseases. Thirdly, we
divide users’ medical data stored in remote cloud of hospital
into three parts, and give them proper protection. Finally, in
order to protect the healthcare system from malicious attacks,
we develop a novel collaborative intrusion detection system
(IDS) method based on cloudlet mesh, which can effectively
prevent the remote healthcare big data cloud from attacks.
Our experiments demonstrate the effectiveness of the proposed
scheme. Combines classical partitioning algorithms with
probabilistic models so as to form an efficient clustering
approach.
Keywords--- IDS, Cloudlets Mining, Number Theory,
Encrypt, Block Chain.
I. INTRODUCTION
T HE client’s physiological data are first collected by
wearable devices such as smart clothing. Then, those data
are delivered to cloudlet. The following two important
problems for healthcare data protection is considered. The first
problem is healthcare data privacy protection and sharing data.
The second problem is to develop effective countermeasures
to prevent the healthcare database from being intruded from
outside.
A. Block Chain
Blockchain, the technology behind Bitcoin, seems to
M. Divya, PG Scholar, Department of Information Technology, K.S.R.
College of Engineering, Tiruchengode, India.
Dr.G. Singaravel, Professor & Head, Department of Information
Technology, K.S.R. College of Engineering, Tiruchengode, India.
DOI:10.9756/BIJSESC.9021
ISSN 2277-5099 | © 2019 Bonfring
be the driving technology behind the next generation of
Internet, also referred to as the Decentralized Web, or the
Web3. Blockchain is a novel solution to the age-old human
problem of trust. It provides an architecture for so-called
trustless trust. It allows us to trust the outputs of the system
without trusting any actor within it.
A Blockchain protocol operates on top of the Internet, on a
P2P Network of computers that all run the protocol and hold
an identical copy of the ledger of transactions, enabling P2P
value transactions without a middleman though machine
consensus. Blockchain itself a file – a shared and public ledger
of transactions that records all transactions from the genesis
block (first block) until today. Blockchain is a shared, trusted,
public ledger of transactions, that everyone can inspect but
which no single user controls. It is a distributed
database that maintains a continuously growing list of
transaction data records, cryptographically secured from
tampering and revision.
The ledger is built using a linked list, or chain of blocks,
where each block contains a certain number of transactions
that were validated by the network in a given timespan. The
crypto-economic rules sets of the blockchain protocol
(consensus layer) regulate the behavioural rules sets and
incentive mechanism of all stakeholders in the network.
• Blockchain technology is like the internet in that it has
a built-in robustness. By storing blocks of information
that are identical across its network, the blockchain
cannot:
• Be controlled by any single entity.
• Has no single point of failure.
Bitcoin was invented in 2008. Since that time, the Bitcoin
blockchain has operated without significant disruption. (To
date, any of problems associated with Bitcoin have been due
to hacking or mismanagement. In other words, these problems
come from bad intention and human error, not flaws in the
underlying concepts.)
The internet itself has proven to be durable for almost 30
years. It’s a track record that bodes well for blockchain
technology as it continues to be developed.
B. Content Sharing and Privacy Protection
Introduce the encryption process for users’ privacy data,
which prevents the leakage or malicious use of users’ private
data during transmissions. Next, we present the identity
management of users who want to access to the hospital’s
healthcare data. Thus, we can assign different users with
different levels of permissions for data access, while avoiding
data access beyond their permission levels. Finally, we give an
application of using users’ private data, which is beneficial to
Bonfring International Journal of Software Engineering and Soft Computing, Vol. 9, No. 2, April 2019
both users and doctors. Based on the healthcare big data stored
in the remote cloud, a disease prediction models built based on
decision tree. The predictions will be reported to the users and
doctors on demand.
C. Encryption at the User End
When using wearable devices to collect users’ data, the
procedure inevitably involves the user’s sensitive information.
Therefore, how to effectively collect and transmit users’ data
under efficient privacy protection is a critical problem. In a
data collection method, called PHDA, is proposed based on
data priority which can give proper cost and delay to different
priorities data. In, Li et al. discuss the process of data
collection and utilizes sum aggregation to obtain data to make
sure the security of users’ privacy in the presence of unreliable
sensors. In , Lu et al., study 3V data privacy protection issue
based on big data of healthcare. Based on the model presented
in, this paper utilizes the advantages of NTRU encryption
scheme. NTRU can protect the user’s physiological data, such
as heart rate, blood pressure and Electrocardiography (ECG),
etc. Before transmitted to a smartphone, NTRU encryption
scheme executed. The encrypted data will then be stored in the
cloudlet through a cellular network or WiFi. We hereby
describe the processes of encryption and deciphering in the
following.
In order to protect medical data, we also develop an
intrusion detection system in this paper. Once a malicious
attack is detected, the system will fire an alarm. This section
presents a novel scheme to build a collaborative IDS system to
deter intruders. In the following, we first consider what
happens if the system is suffering from different attacks, while
detection rates for individual IDS vary with the cloudlet
servers. We will plot the detection rate and false alarm rate as
the receiver operating characteristic (ROC) curves. Next, we
evaluate the collaborative detection rate and estimate the
expected cost of implementation in the cloudlet mesh. We
apply a decision tree to choose the optimal number of IDS’s to
be deployed on the mesh. The goal is to achieve prescribed
detection accuracy against the false alarm rate under the
premise of minimizing the system cost.
Collaborative IDS is designed among m IDS, S1, S2, Sm,
in order to get higher detection rate and lower false alarm rate.
The IDS assumed to be detect Independently. There exists a K
different type of intrusion. So according to deduce in the
following, we can get the detection rate and false alarm rate of
collaborative IDS. In order to evaluate it , we give the ROC
curve. Before transmitting data to the remote cloud, we
establish the collaborative IDS based on the cloudlet mesh to
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complete the intrusion detection task. We use {S1, S2, . . . ,
Sm} to represent the set of IDS’s in the IDS (CIDS) .Suppose
that each IDS is able to detect intrusion independently. For the
sake of simplicity, we use I to indicate that there is intrusion
behaviour.
II. RELATED WORKS
M. S. Hossain et al., [1] the potential of cloud-supported
cyber-physical systems (CCPSs) has drawn a great deal of
interest from academia and industry. CCPSs facilitate the
seamless integration of devices in the physical world (e.g.,
sensors, cameras, microphones, speakers, and GPS devices)
with cyberspace. This enables a range of emerging
applications or systems such as patient or health monitoring,
which require patient locations to be tracked. These systems
integrate a large number of physical devices such as sensors
with localization technologies (e.g., GPS and wireless local
area networks) to generate, sense, analyse, and share huge
quantities of medical and user-location data for complex
processing. However, there are a number of challenges
regarding these systems in terms of the positioning of patients,
ubiquitous access, large-scale computation, and
communication. Hence, there is a need for an infrastructure or
system that can provide scalability and ubiquity in terms of
huge real-time data processing and communications in the
cyber or cloud space. To this end, this paper proposes a cloud-
supported cyber-physical localization system for patient
monitoring using smartphones to acquire voice and
electroencephalogram signals in a scalable, real-time, and
efficient manner. The proposed approach uses Gaussian
mixture modelling for localization and is shown to outperform
other similar methods in terms of error estimation.
K. T. Pickard and M. Swan [2] Sharing personal health
information is essential to create next generation healthcare
services. To realize preventive and personalized medicine,
large numbers of consumers must pool health information to
create datasets that can be analysed for wellness and disease
trends. Incorporating this information will not only empower
consumers, but also enable health systems to improve patient
care. To date, consumers have been reluctant to share personal
health information for a variety of reasons, but attitudes are
shifting. Results from an online survey demonstrate a strong
willingness to share health information for research purposes.
Building on these results, the authors present a framework to
increase health information sharing based on trust, motivation,
community, and informed consent.
J. Yang, J. Li, J. Mulder, Y. Wang [3] The appropriate
collection and consumption of electronic health information
about an individual patient or population is the bedrock of
modern healthcare, where electronic medical records (EMR)
serve as the main carrier. This paper first introduces the main
goal of this special issue and gives a brief guideline. Then, the
present situation of the adoption of EMRs is reviewed. After
that, the emerging information technologies are presented
which have a great impact on the healthcare provision. These
include health sensing for medical data collection, medical
data analysis and utilization for accurate detection and
prediction. Next, cloud computing is discussed, as it may
Bonfring International Journal of Software Engineering and Soft Computing, Vol. 9, No. 2, April 2019
provide scalable and cost-effective delivery of healthcare
services. Accordingly, the current state of academic research
is documented on emerging information technologies for new
paradigms of healthcare service. At last, conclusions are made.
Y. Wu, M. Su, W. Zheng, K. Hwang [4] In a community
cloud, multiple user groups dynamically share a massive
number of data blocks. The authors present a new associative
data sharing method that uses virtual disks in the MeePo
cloud, a research storage cloud built at Tsinghua University.
Innovations in the MeePo cloud design include big data
metering, associative data sharing, data block prefetching,
privileged access control (PAC), and privacy preservation.
These features are improved or extended from competing
features implemented in DropBox, CloudViews, and
MySpace. The reported results support the effectiveness of the
MeePo cloud.
Kirti A. Dongre ; Roshan Singh Thakur [5] Cloud
computing is one of the upcoming technologies that will
upgrade generation of Internet. The data stored in the smart
phones is increased as more applications are deployed and
executed. If the phone is damaged or lost then the information
stored in it gets lost. If the cloud storage can be integrated for
regular data backup of a mobile user so that the risk of data
lost can be minimized. The user can stored data in the server
and retrieve them at anytime and from anywhere. The data
might be uncovered by attack during the retrieval or
transmission of data using wireless cloud storage without
proper authentication and protection. So to avoid this in this
paper we design a mechanism that provides a security
requirement for data storage of mobile phones.
X.Xue and W.B.Croft [6] propose a novel framework
where the original query is transformed into a distribution of
reformulated queries. A reformulated query is generated by
applying different operations including adding or replacing
query words, detecting phrase structures, and so on. Since the
reformulated query that involves a particular choice of words
and phrases is explicitly modelled, this framework captures
dependencies between those query components. On the other
hand, this framework naturally combines query segmentation,
query substitution and other possible reformulation operations,
where all these operations are considered as methods for
generating reformulated queries. In other words, a
reformulated query is the output of applying single or multiple
reformulation operations.
Jimeng Sun, Fei Wang, Jianying Hu, Shahram
Edabollahi[7] Patient similarity assessment is an important
task in the context of patient cohort identification for
comparative effectiveness studies and clinical decision support
applications. The goal is to derive clinically meaningful
distance metric to measure the similarity between patients
represented by their key clinical indicators. How to
incorporate physician feedback with regard to the retrieval
results? How to interactively update the underlying similarity
measure based on the feedback? Moreover, often different
physicians have different understandings of patient similarity
based on their patient cohorts. The distance metric learned for
each individual physician often leads to a limited view of the
true underlying distance metric. How to integrate the
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individual distance metrics from each physician into a globally
consistent unified metric? We describe a suite of supervised
metric learning approaches that answer the above questions. In
particular, we present Locally Supervised Metric Learning
(LSML) to learn a generalized Mahalanobis distance that is
tailored toward physician feedback. Then we describe the
interactive metric learning (iMet) method that can
incrementally update an existing metric based on physician
feedback in an online fashion. To combine multiple similarity
measures from multiple physicians, we present Composite
Distance Integration (Comdi) method. In this approach we
first construct discriminative neighbourhoods from each
individual metrics, then combine them into a single optimal
distance metric. Finally, we present a clinical decision support
prototype system powered by the proposed patient similarity
methods, and evaluate the proposed methods using real EHR
data against several baselines.
A. Sajid and H. Abbas, [8] The widespread deployment
and utility of Wireless Body Area Networks (WBAN's) in
healthcare systems required new technologies like Internet of
Things (IoT) and cloud computing, that are able to deal with
the storage and processing limitations of WBAN's. This
amalgamation of WBAN-based healthcare systems to cloud-
based healthcare systems gave rise to serious privacy concerns
to the sensitive healthcare data. Hence, there is a need for the
proactive identification and effective mitigation mechanisms
for these patient's data privacy concerns that pose continuous
threats to the integrity and stability of the healthcare
environment. For this purpose, a systematic literature review
has been conducted that presents a clear picture of the privacy
concerns of patient's data in cloud-assisted healthcare systems
and analysed the mechanisms that are recently proposed by the
research community. The methodology used for conducting
the review was based on Kitchenham guidelines. Results from
the review show that most of the patient's data privacy
techniques do not fully address the privacy concerns and
therefore require more efforts. The summary presented in this
paper would help in setting research directions for the
techniques and mechanisms that are needed to address the
patient's data privacy concerns in a balanced and light-weight
manner by considering all the aspects and limitations of the
cloud-assisted healthcare systems.
Sachchidanand Singh ; Nirmala Singh[8] Blockchain is
a decentralized ledger used to securely exchange digital
currency, perform deals and transactions. Each member of the
network has access to the latest copy of encrypted ledger so
that they can validate a new transaction. Blockchain ledger is a
collection of all Bitcoin transactions executed in the past.
Basically, it's a distributed database which maintains a
continuously growing tamper proof data structure blocks
which holds batches of individual transactions. The completed
blocks are added in a linear and chronological order. Each
block contains a timestamp and information link which points
to a previous block. Bitcoin is peer-to-peer permission-less
network which allows every user to connect to the network
and send new transaction to verify and create new blocks.
Satoshi Nakamoto described design of Bitcoin digital currency
in his research paper posted to cryptography listserv in 2008.
Nakamoto's suggestion has solved long pending problem of
Bonfring International Journal of Software Engineering and Soft Computing, Vol. 9, No. 2, April 2019
cryptographers and laid the foundation stone for digital
currency. This paper explains the concept, characteristics,
need of Blockchain and how Bitcoin works. It attempts to
highlights role of Blockchain in shaping the future of banking,
financial institutions and adoption of Internet of Things(IoT).
III. METHODOLOGY
3.1 Client Data Encryption
We utilize the model presented in, and take the advantage
of NTRU to protect the client’s physiological data from being
leaked or abused. This scheme is to protect the user’s privacy
when transmitting the data from the smartphone to the
cloudlet.
3.2 Cloudlet based Data Sharing
Typically, users geographically close to each other connect
to the same cloudlet. It’s likely for them to share common
aspects, for example, patients suffer from similar kind of
disease exchange information of treatment and share related
data. For this purpose, we use users’ similarity and reputation
as input data. After we obtain users’ trust levels, a certain
threshold is set for the comparison. Once reaching or
exceeding the threshold, it is considered that the trust between
the users is enough for data sharing. Otherwise, the data will
not share with low trust level.
3.3 Remote Cloud Data Privacy Protection
Compared to user’s daily data in cloudlet, the data stored
in remote contain larger scale medical data, e.g., EMR, which
will be stored for a long term. We use the methods presented
to divide EMR into explicit identifier (EID), quasi-identifier
(QID) and medical information (MI). After classifying, proper
protection is given for the data containing users’ sensitive
information.
3.4 Collaborative Ids based on Cloudlet Mesh
There is a vast volume of medical data stored in the remote
cloud, it is critical to apply security mechanism to protect the
database from malicious intrusions. In this paper, we develop
specific countermeasures to establish a defence system for the
large medical database in the remote cloud storage.
Specifically, collaborative IDS based on the cloudlet mesh
structure is used to screen any visit to the database as a
protection border. If the detection shows a malicious intrusion
in advance, the collaborative IDS will fire an alarm and block
the visit, and vice-versa. The collaborative IDS, as a guard of
the cloud database, can protect a vast number of medical data
and make sure of the security of the database.
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IV. CONCLUSION
In this paper, we investigated the problem of privacy
protection and sharing large medical data in cloudlets and the
remote cloud. We developed a system which does not allow
users to transmit data to the remote cloud in consideration of
secure collection of data, as well as low communication cost.
However, it does allow users to transmit data to a cloudlet,
which triggers the data sharing problem in the cloudlet.
Firstly, we can utilize wearable devices to collect users’ data,
and in order to protect users privacy, we use NTRU
mechanism to make sure the transmission of users’ data to
cloudlet in security. Secondly, for the purpose of sharing data
in the cloudlet, we use trust model to measure users trust level
to judge level to share data or not. Thirdly, for privacy-
preserving of remote cloud data, we partition the data stored in
the remote cloud and encrypt the data in different ways, so as
to not just ensure data protection but also accelerate the
efficacy of transmission. Finally, we propose collaborative
IDS based on cloudlet mesh to protect the whole system with
block chain technology. The proposed schemes are validated
with simulations and experiments.
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