SeCoSe: Toward Searchable and Communicable Healthcare Service Seeking in Flexible and Secure EHR Sharing

Zhihuang Liu, Ling Hu, Zhiping Cai, Ximeng Liu, Yanhua Liu

Abstract: Cloud-assisted electronic health record (EHR) sharing plays an important role in modern healthcare systems but faces threats of distrust and non-traceability. The advent of blockchain offers an attractive solution to overcome this issue. Many efforts are devoted to promoting secure, flexible, and multi-featured blockchain-based EHR sharing. Yet, the problem of seeking out suitable healthcare providers and communicating information beyond the EHR has unfortunately been ignored. In this paper, we propose SeCoSe, a novel EHR sharing scheme to address these concerns. SeCoSe enables patients and their general practitioners to autonomously seek out and stay in touch with their preferred healthcare professionals. Specifically, a searchable and repeatable transformation identity-based encryption (SRTIBE) is proposed to achieve dynamic and flexible authorization updates. Moreover, we design attribute-identity mapping contracts and evidence-based contracts on the blockchain to enable on-demand retrieval of anonymous identities and ensure tamper resistance and traceability of system transactions. Furthermore, we employ the advanced messages on-chain protocol (AMOP) to facilitate the online communication of off-chain messages. Detailed security analysis and extensive evaluations demonstrate that SeCoSe is privacy-secure, traceable, and attack-resistant. SeCoSe has lower overhead for repeated authorization and transformation, on-chain transactions can be responded to within seconds, and online communication can handle the transmission of 49,000 messages in about 6 seconds.