Blockchain for Access Control in e-Health Scenarios
This addresses access control challenges in e-Health systems, but it is incremental as it applies an existing blockchain method to a specific domain.
The paper tackled the problem of sharing access control policies between e-Health facilities, which are prone to faults and integrity issues, by using a consortium blockchain to ensure integrity, auditability, authenticity, and scalability.
Access control is a crucial part of a system's security, restricting what actions users can perform on resources. Therefore, access control is a core component when dealing with e-Health data and resources, discriminating which is available for a certain party. We consider that current systems that attempt to assure the share of policies between facilities are prone to system's and network's faults and do not assure the integrity of policies lifecycle. By approaching this problem with the use of a distributed ledger, namely a consortium blockchain, where the operations are stored as transactions, we ensure that the different facilities have knowledge about all the parties that can act over the e-Health resources while maintaining integrity, auditability, authenticity, and scalability.