Privacy preserving IoT-based healthcare data using fog-to-cloud computing

Abstract

Over the past few decades, the world has become more connected with the wide adoption of Internet of Things (IoT), cloud computing, and fog computing. These technologies are the driving force to collect, process, and store medical data. However, the privacy and security of health data represent major challenges. For this purpose, to enhance the security and benefit from the advantages of cloud and fog computing, a hierarchical Fog-To-Cloud (F2C) computing system was introduced which integrates the fog and the cloud in a single model. In this thesis, we provide a comprehensive state-of-the-art that deals with the aforementioned problem in the context of IoT, F2C, and e-health. Then, we propose two contributions using several technologies. As the patient’s medical data are accessible by users who have diverse privileges, we have adopted a decentralized access control system using blockchain and Self-Sovereign Identity (SSI) for privacy-preserving data. Hence, our proposed approach focuses on smart contract to conduct Role-Based Access Control policies (RBAC) and adopts the implementation of Decentralized IDentifiers (DID) and Verifiable Credentials (VC) to describe advanced access control techniques for emergency cases. Experimental results based on privacy-preserving medical records demonstrate that our proposed solution ensures a high level of security, protect data privacy, empower patients with mechanisms to preserve control over their personal information, and allow them to self-grant access rights to their medical data.