A Hash-Based Assessment and Recovery Algorithm for Distributed Healthcare Systems Using Blockchain Technology

Abstract

The improvement of information technology in the past few years has been encouraging the healthcare sector to share medical data online without any barriers and between different parties. Many research works have been done to achieve this goal, and blockchain-based approaches have proved to be decent solutions. However, security challenges can put such distributed databases storing sensitive healthcare data under threat. For example, attackers can access highly sensitive data, altering or deleting some records, or violating the integrity of the database. Many preventive measures have been applied to protect the databases from attacks. However, no one can be confident that the system is safe and secure. Here rises the need for an algorithm that can assess the damage that occurred before recovering the database back to its consistent state. Numerous damage assessment and recovery algorithms have been proposed in the literature. In this work, we present a distributed algorithm that uses blockchain technology and hash tables to solve the information warfare problem in healthcare systems. The proposed algorithm is compared with different previous works and experimental results are recorded.