Towards Secure and Privacy-Preserving Data Sharing for COVID-19 Medical Records: A Blockchain-Empowered Approach

COVID-19 is currently a major global public health challenge. In the battle against the outbreak of COVID-19, how to manage and share the COVID-19 Electric Medical Records (CEMRs) safely and effectively in the world, prevent malicious users from tampering with CEMRs, and protect the privacy of patients are very worthy of attention. In particular, the semi-trusted medical cloud platform has become the primary means of hospital medical data management and information services. Security and privacy issues in the medical cloud platform are more prominent and should be addressed with priority. To address these issues, on the basis of ciphertext policy attribute-based encryption, we propose a blockchain-empowered security and privacy protection scheme with traceable and direct revocation for COVID-19 medical records. In this scheme, we perform the blockchain for uniform identity authentication and all public keys, revocation lists, etc are stored on a blockchain. The system manager server is responsible for generating the system parameters and publishes the private keys for the COVID-19 medical practitioners and users. The cloud service provider (CSP) stores the CEMRs and generates the intermediate decryption parameters using policy matching. The user can calculate the decryption key if the user has private keys and intermediate decrypt parameters. Only when attributes are satisfied access policy and the user's identity is out of the revocation list, the user can get the intermediate parameters by CSP. The malicious users may track according to the tracking list and can be directly revoked. The security analysis demonstrates that the proposed scheme is indicated to be safe under the Decision Bilinear Diffie-Hellman (DBDH) assumption and can resist many attacks. The simulation experiment demonstrates that the communication and storage overhead is less than other schemes in the public-private key generation, CEMRs encryption, and decryption stages. Besides, we also verify that the proposed scheme works well in the blockchain in terms of both throughput and delay.

An Incentive Based Road Traffic Control Mechanism for Covid-19 Pandemic Alike Emergency Preparedness and Response

The Covid-19 pandemic has hit hard on the highly-organised yet risk-vulnerable modern societies, and has introduced new characteristics to large-scale emergencies, which feature long persistence in duration, high frequency in occurrence, large sensitivity to individual behaviours, and extreme high hazard propagation rate owing to the highly-efficient transport networks. This has raised new challenges on long-term emergency preparedness of urban transportation systems in terms of safety, efficiency, robustness and sustainability. Non-cooperative behaviours of transport participants could result in severe performance degradation in emergency preparedness, and mandatory restrictions in human activities can be economical costly and difficult in operation. In addition, current arrangement models for the disaster financial assistance have not been elaborately designed for civilian behaviour optimisation although with great potential as an economical instrument. Hence, in this paper, we propose a reward based traffic control mechanism to generate cooperative behaviours and optimise resource allocation in an urban transportation system for emergency preparedness via distributing credit coins, which can also be treated as a financial assistance approach during long-term disasters. A queueing theory based analytic model is employed to mimic the behaviours of civilians in the transportation system under the emergency preparedness state and a probability choice model is utilised to optimise the emergency preparedness strategies of the system. The experimental results show that the introduction of the incentive based traffic control mechanism can significantly reduce hazard response time, travel delay as well as the energy usage of the urban transportation system at the expense of monetary rewards.

A management method of chronic diseases in the elderly based on IoT security environment

Due to the global influenza pandemic and the increasing health problems of the elderly, healthcare for the elderly has become an important application of Internet of Things(IoT) technology. However, under the condition of smart healthcare, the privacy of the elderly is not well protected. Therefore, to ensure the information security of the elderly, this paper proposes a management method for elderly chronic diseases based on the IoT security environment, establishes a security protection mechanism, and uses the IoT technology to monitor the vital signs of the elderly in real-time. At the same time, the Disease Immune Rehabilitation Algorithm (DIRA) is constructed based on the physiological data collected by the device to identify healthy people and reduce the number of infected people. Through experiments on several generations, the results show that this method can increase the proportion of the immune population to a certain extent and reduce the number of infected people.

Efficient and Privacy-Preserving Medical Research Support Platform Against COVID-19: A Blockchain-Based Approach

COVID-19 is a major global public health challenge and difficult to control in a short time completely. To prevent the COVID-19 epidemic from continuing to worsen, global scientific research institutions have actively carried out studies on COVID-19, thereby effectively improving the prevention, monitoring, tracking, control, and treatment of the epidemic. However, the COVID-19 electronic medical records (CEMRs) among hospitals worldwide are managed independently. With privacy consideration, CEMRs cannot be made public or shared, which is not conducive to in-depth and extensive research on COVID-19 by medical research institutions. In addition, even if new research results are developed, the disclosure and sharing process is slow. To address this issue, we propose a blockchain-based medical research support platform, which can provide efficient and privacy-preserving data sharing against COVID-19. First, hospitals and medical research institutions are treated as nodes on the alliance chain, so consensus and data sharing among the nodes is achieved. Then, COVID-19 patients, doctors, and researchers need to be authenticated in various institutes. Moreover, doctors and researchers need to be registered with the Fabric certificate authority. The CEMRs for COVID-19 patients uses the blockchain's pseudonym mechanism to protect privacy. After that, doctors upload CEMRs on the alliance chain, and researchers can obtain CEMRs from the alliance chain for research. Finally, the research results will be published on the blockchain for doctors to use. The experimental results show that the read and write performance and security performance on the alliance chain meet the requirements, which can promote the wide application of scientific research results against COVID-19.