Securing smart health in smart cities: Blockchain technology to secure electronic health data sharing

In the era of smart cities, safeguarding electronic health records (EHRs) is crucial to ensure the privacy and security of citizens’ sensitive medical information. Existing medical data transfer methods are vulnerable to privacy breaches, making it challenging to protect patient data. This research proposes a novel blockchain-based approach to secure EHR sharing in smart cities. Our method leverages improved association rule mining to identify sensitive information, which is then encrypted using the Siberian Tiger Integrated Tuna Swarm algorithm to generate an optimal encryption key. The encrypted data are stored on a blockchain, ensuring its integrity and confidentiality. Our proposed model demonstrates maximum robustness against various attacks, including chosen ciphertext attack, chosen-plaintext attack, known ciphertext attack, and known-plaintext attack. This research contributes to the development of secure and privacy-preserving smart health infrastructure in smart cities, enabling the safe sharing of EHRs and promoting better health-care outcomes.