A Blockchain-based Lightweight Security Framework for IoT-Enabled Smart Healthcare Systems

Integration of Internet of Things (IoT) devices within smart healthcare environment has significantly developed patient monitoring and further clinical decision making. While this advancement has had many benefits, these have also come with the introduction of very severe security vulnerabilities stemming from the wireless nature and limited resources of devices. In this paper, a blockchain based lightweight security framework is proposed for IoT enabled smart healthcare system. The permissioned blockchain framework is designed for secure and tamper-proof data exchange with a minimum of computational and energy overhead. To enable real time authentication and secure data transmission in such scenarios involving heterogeneous medical devices, an embedded lightweight cryptographic scheme is embedded in the blockchain layer. In addition, a consensus protocol optimized for decentralizing trust is designed that does not include large delay or resource consumption. A custom IoT health care testbed integrated with Hyperledger Fabric was experimented, and the performance was analyzed by the parameters throughput, latency, energy consumption and attack resilience. The results show that with the same level of security, the proposed system consumes a lot less resources than the traditional models. The framework provides a practical path to IoT in next generation smart healthcare infrastructure deployment that is secure and scalable.