Securing internet of medical devices using energy efficient blockchain for healthcare 4.0

Healthcare 4.0 promises enormous breakthroughs in the Internet of Medical Device (IoMD) environment, allowing billions of devices to communicate seamlessly. The introduction of sixth-generation (6G) networks with IoMD improves smart healthcare services by enabling more efficient, robust, sustainable, low cost, and ubiquitous solutions, as well as improving sensing, communication, and interaction capabilities in context-aware settings. However, providing the secure authentication of these devices while also safeguarding data integrity presents considerable challenges. The current systems that rely on centralized servers are vulnerable to unwanted access and modification. To overcome this challenge, the use of Physical Unclonable Function (PUF) and blockchain technology can be made. In this paper, PUF-based authentication technique is integrated with blockchain technology to secure IoMD network in healthcare 4.0. To make it energy efficient as IoMD considered as constrained device, a novel consensus mechanism “Proof-of-Energy" has been introduced which will increase the transaction processing speed while reducing energy consumption. The experimental result shows the proposed model exhibits better security, efficiency and performance in this direction.