A Study of Layer-2 Consortium Blockchain with zk-SNARKs for Medical Information Management

In the distributed medical information management system, blockchain technology has more obvious advantages in terms of data tampering data traceability. However, considering the scalability issues of current Layer-1 blockchain, uploading massive medical information data onto the blockchain will add non-negligible space storage pressure. Patients are also unable to have a comprehensive grasp of their personal privacy information retained in these data, which can lead to concern about the system’s privacy and security. To cope with these challenges, this paper introduced Layer-2 network to reduce the data space occupation in a single block. By storing unnecessary information in the off-chain channel, the transaction speed and throughput of the system would be improved. In addition, to strengthen the security within the process of data communication and storage, this paper also deployed the system based on consortium blockchain utilizing AWS cloud service. And the system integrated with the zero-knowledge proof algorithm zk-SNARKs to protect personal information privacy. According to the experimental simulation and analysis, the proposed scheme can reduce data storage space in the Lay-1 blockchain. What’s more, it also allows quick verification of on-chain data without disclosing personal privacy information.