Data protection in internet of medical things using blockchain and secret sharing method

The Internet of Medical Things (IoMT) amalgamates the Internet of Things (IoT) with medical devices, revolutionizing health care by providing cost-effective solutions and expediting patient treatments. The burgeoning use of IoMT has ushered in significant data security challenges, prompting investigations into blockchain and IPFS (InterPlanetary File System) solutions. However, many of these solutions lean heavily on key-based encryption, which is increasingly vulnerable to emerging cryptographic advancements, such as quantum computing. Moreover, certain solutions overlook the potential threat posed by resource-abundant attackers like corrupted cloud service providers, who could exploit IPFS nodes for unauthorized data access within an IPFS cluster. Thus, ensuring data confidentiality within the IoMT architecture is a pressing concern. To address these challenges, we propose an innovative architecture that combines blockchain and IPFS, bolstered by a secret sharing algorithm (SSA) for robust data protection. Our architecture leverages SSA to fragment data and securely stores these fragments on publicly accessible IPFS clusters. SSA's information-theoretic security guarantees data confidentiality, even when a portion of IPFS nodes is compromised and key-based encryption is circumvented. By integrating SSA, our architecture adeptly harnesses the decentralization and scalability advantages of public IPFS clusters. Moreover, the inclusion of a public blockchain within our architecture enhances transparency and trust throughout the data uploading and sharing processes. A prototype of our proposed architecture is implemented and tested within an IoMT-based monitoring scenario to investigate its feasibility, scalability, and performance.