Integrating Homomorphic Encryption in IoT Healthcare Blockchain Systems

The Internet of Things (IoT) has recently been implemented in various applications. An IoT network is a group of Internet-connected computing devices embedded in everyday objects. Usually, those devices can interact with each other via the Internet by exchanging data. Because of privacy and security requirements, users of IoT-connected objects need measures to secure corresponding data during storage and transmission. This work presents an architecture that integrates IoT devices, blockchain technology, and embedded homomorphic encryption to ensure high computation speed and security levels in IoT systems. The ultralight linear encryption technique enhances computation speed, making it possible to obtain homomorphic addition over the encrypted data. Using this technique, each administrator gains specific access to the encrypted data. Security, stability, traceability, and anonymity are provided through blockchain technology, which is used to store data. The proposed architecture is demonstrated via a use case from the healthcare sector. The experimental analysis shows our technique’s effectiveness in energy consumption reduction and privacy preservation with minimal computation and communication costs. By using five fields per record, name, ID, age, gender, and blood glucose level, we achieved an encryption time equals 0,19 ms and decryption time equals 0,98 ms vs. 15,7 and 1,6 respectively in the best comparison technique. In communication cost, we achieved 1KB vs. 5KB.