Distributed Security Architecture Based on Blockchain for Connected Health: Architecture, Challenges, and Approaches

The ubiquitous nature of a connected health system imposes challenges with regard to the design of system architecture, security, and privacy. Different from traditional centralized systems, a distributed blockchain-based security protection architecture is proposed. In particular, smart contracts, as an intelligent protocol in the blockchain technology, are exploited to automatically achieve system confidentiality, integrity, and authenticity. Research challenges related to security and privacy issues in our proposed architecture are then analyzed, followed by potential solutions. Finally, security performance simulations and analyses are conducted to validate and evaluate the effectiveness of the proposed security architecture.