Introduction
It is observed that there is a progressive shift towards the cloud in healthcare data and services. The major drivers behind this shift is the cost reduction, sharing and exchanging information, and the real-time data availability. However, the importance and sensitive nature of health data poses challenges to the centralization features in Cloud Computing and give rise to problems regarding the security and privacy of healthcare data. This research identifies and analyzes such security and privacy issues and how to tackle such problems with the integration of block-chain technology. There is a huge potential for block-chain technology to solve the data security and privacy issues with appropriate strategies as it incorporates features such as decentralization, trustlessness (i.e., the participants involved in the system do not need to trust it), distributed storage of data, point-to-point transmission, and encryption algorithms that deviate from the conventional cryptographic primitives. In this paper, we integrate cloud computing with block-chain technology to make the most of strengths in both technologies and eventually introduce a security and privacy scheme for healthcare data and services.
Background/Preliminary Literature Review
According to Christian Expasito et al (2018) discusses the trend of shifting towards cloud computing in the healthcare domain, the major limitations in it, and how the Blockchain technology could help in protecting the hosted data in the cloud environment. They further discuss the challenges that this approach may come across.
Another significant work in this domain is the research done by Nguyen et al (2019) discussing the aforementioned changes while they call it a paradigm shift in storage of the Electronic Health Records. The researchers elaborate on the concerns of integrating the healthcare services with the mobile cloud computing and propose a novel approach to share EHRs. The main contribution to this research is brought forward with its implementation of Ethereum blockchain which tests on a real scenario to share data from a mobile device with Amazon cloud services.
One of the major concepts discussed in the research is the security and privacy of the data in healthcare services. Such issues and challenges have been raised by Lynda et al (2015) and they have described the architectures of cloud computing in eHealth, problems related to those described architectures, and various solutions to overcome those issues and challenges.
While more related work in this research domain has contributed to security integration and issues solving in healthcare companies, the necessity of identifying inconsistencies in security policies has been focused by Kuang et al (2009). They have provided logical reasons to the solutions they suggest aiming to bring solutions to cross-organization collaborations. Their main contribution in the paper is the proposal of a security and privacy model with consideration of temporal and spatial context in the policies.
The literature review will further be improved in the research seminar and task submission.
Research Problem/Significance
Protecting the integrity, accuracy and security of healthcare data is a sensitive area of study since numerous parties are trying to steal, manipulate information for their personal financial benefits. Cybercriminals seeking data to sell to third parties who are willing to perform analysis on these types of data can be taken as a simple example for this (Esposito, 2018).
Due to the complexity of healthcare systems and its components, ensuring security of EMR/EHR/PHR ecosystem is a challenging yet crucial task since the risk implies to not only external attackers, but also unauthorized access attempts from inside the ecosystem which can be a potential data breach or leakage which can lead up to even the organization being penalized under the Health Insurance Portability and Accountability Act (Esposito, 2018) (Nguyen, 2019).
Among the current approaches that have been taken into action, using cryptographic primitives based on public key infrastructure comes at the top. It means encrypting data prior to outgoing data to the cloud and decrypting them while retrieving. But this method includes various complications like higher retrieval time and complex search functions (limited search functionality due to the reason the whole data set has to be accessed and decrypted in order to find one data) which can lead to extended costs. Another approach is using Access control models based on predefined access policies to regulate and limit access. Also, a combination of these such as attribute based encryption which limit access through decryption methodologies could be taken as another approach. These methods reduce the risk of external attacks to some extent, but internal attacks could still happen (Kuang, 2009).
Since healthcare depends on technology at a higher level, protecting the accuracy of data collected from patients is among the top priorities. Loss of data or manipulation of data can lead up to extreme results since these data are being accessed to monitor a patient, to plan tests on the patient and for many other crucial tasks. That’s why the area of ensuring the security and privacy approaches of Healthcare data based on cloud systems need to be more accurate under convenient methods more than what has been discussed before (Lynda, 2015).
Research Aim and Objectives
Our main research aim is to integrate block chain with cloud computing to minimize the security and privacy issues of healthcare data and services hosted in the cloud. In order to achieve this, aim the following research objectives will be covered.
- A thorough literature review on healthcare data and services in cloud computing, security and privacy of healthcare data and services and block chain approaches.
- Identifying the appropriate data that can be used in the implementation and evaluation processes.
- Data gathering
- Data analysis and reporting of results.
- Compilation of the research with a journal paper.
Research Contribution
Business Analysis is about identifying the needs and problems of a particular business and finding the best solutions to those problems. Sometimes these may include software systems that improve the processes of business and sometimes these may include strategic plans which aim to improve business aspects. As Business Analysis is one of the specializations being studied, this research contributed to the field of business analysis in the following ways.
- Cloud-based security and privacy in health-care services is an emerging business problem and this research intends to provide a technological solution to the problem.
- Risks involved in integrating block-chain with cloud computing in healthcare are carefully analyzed and addressed in this research.
- Business benefits of integrating blockchain with cloud-computing are identified and well determined.
- Improve the business process of storing data and services in the cloud.
Computer Networks on the other hand delivers connectivity. Organizations are transforming themselves digitally and their improvements in networking plays a critical role in this transformation. When diving into further topics in computer networking, the specific fields like cloud computing and their security and privacy aspects are covered. This also includes the emerging technologies such as blockchain technology. This research contributes to the field of computer networking in the following ways.
- This research encourages progress towards an understanding of more specific topics in the field such as cloud computing, security in cloud computing and emerging technologies such as block-chain.
- Introduce security and privacy issues in the cloud computing field and how it affects the healthcare data and services.
- Identify the solutions to the issues that occur in taking the healthcare data and services to the cloud environment.
- Introduce a solution to deal with the security and privacy issues that arise in the cloud network.
- Identify the advantages of integrating the blockchain technology with cloud computing.
- Identify the issues and other challenges that occur in integrating the blockchain technology with cloud computing.
Research Methodology
The research methodology of this research will incorporate a qualitative methodology where data will be collected from past research papers and interviews from business partners relating to the health care data and services. These collected data will be analyzed further in order to come to conclusions about the suggested approach. Qualitative methods of analyzing the research will be implemented in the methodology (Bhandari, 2020).
Data collection and systems design methods
Data required for the system will be collected from previously done research, published journals, and interview questions from the related stakeholders of e-health community. The four major databases ACM digital library, Google Scholar, Research Gate, and IEEE Explore will be searched using relevant keywords and famous authors in the domain. The papers will go through a screening process to determine what papers are best suited and then the selected papers will be thoroughly analyzed to search for data.
The data will be analyzed qualitatively and a better approach that gives solutions for the problems mentioned will be designed.
Ethical Issues
Even though this research deals with healthcare data no real data will be handled and therefore no privacy issues are violated. As for the ethical issues, this work will be entirely mine and the assisted documents will be given the relevant credit and acknowledged.
Compliance Requirements
The compliance requirements from the university will be met and as this is a academic research no workplace requirements are involved. Even though this research focuses on security of health care data no real data will be used and hence no need to fulfill the government compliance requirements.
Research Scope and Boundaries
Although the main aim of this research is to integrate blockchain into cloud computing to enhance security and privacy of the healthcare data and services, no real-life implementation of this concept will be carried out.
This research will only consider the current approaches, the limitations of the current approaches, the advantages of bringing blockchain into cloud computing, the theory behind the methods of integrating blockchain into cloud computing, and the limitations and challenges of the proposed approach.
Research Timeline and Work Breakdown Structure
The research timeline for the proposed research was created using ProjectLibre and the Gantt chart for the timeline is given below.
Gantt Chart
Work Breakdown Structure
WEEKLY PROGRESS REPORT
| NAME | Ranidu Thiwanka | ||
| PROJECT TITLE | Integrated block-chain technology in health care services and cloud-based security and privacy | ||
| WEEK NO | 4 | DATE | 22 April 2021 |
| PLANNING | |||
| MILESTONE | PLANNED | ACTUAL | COMMENT |
| Research Project Proposal | 100% – 7 days | 100% – 7 days | The research proposal was drafted and finalized under these topics.
|
| ISSUES | |||
| DESCRIPTION | DATE | ACTION/RESULTS | FINISHED |
| Clearly identifying the boundaries and setting up the limitations and delimitations of the study | First the in-scope of the study was determined reading the currently selected papers for the literature review and then identified the out scope of the study considering the timeline of the research | ||
| Creating the research timeline using a Project Software | The charts for the research timeline was created using ProjectLibre. However, it took a considerable time to get used to the software and get a clarified view. The presentation of the charts is not attractive in ProjectLibre. | ||