Cover
Vol. 22 No. 1 (2026)

Published: June 15, 2026

Pages: 374-387

Original Article

Securing Healthcare Data Exchange Based on Fog Computing and Blockchain Technologies

Muwafaq Jawad 1 Ali A. Yassin, 1 Hamid Ali Abed AL-Asadi 1
1 Department of Computer Science, College of Education for Pure Sciences, University of Basrah, Basrah 61004, Iraq
History
  • Received: April 19, 2024
  • Revised: August 1, 2024
  • Accepted: August 10, 2024
  • Available Online: June 15, 2026
DOI

https://doi.org/10.37917/ijeee.22.1.33

Abstract

IoHT has several benefits for real-time smart healthcare, but because of its limited processing power, storage capacity, and self-defense capabilities, security issues are growing. Although newer blockchain-based authentication solutions have strong security features due to their tamper-resistant decentralized architecture, they come with a high resource cost, requiring a lot of processing power, more storage, and time-consuming authentication procedures. As such, these difficulties provide barriers to reaching the ideal levels of scalability and temporal efficiency, which are essential for the efficient functioning of large-scale, time-sensitive IoHT systems. To solve these challenges, this paper presents an authentication approach designed especially for IoHT systems. Our work consists four-phase process, which includes setting, registration, login and authentication, and HERs Exchange data. To enhance both efficiency and scalability, the proposed scheme employs a combination of 3-D map dimensions chaotic-based public key cryptosystems, and blockchain-based, fog computing technologies and IPFS. We simulate the proposed work to implement health electronic record (HER) by the Ethereum platform and solidity language, the simulation experiments were tested using the JMeter tool. Showed that the key generation time for chaotic-based is faster than (ECC)—furthermore, the average latency ≈ 3.7 ms. A security analysis of the proposed scheme was implemented by the Scyther tool. The formal security analysis demonstrated that the proposed scheme is secured against potential attacks and supports the scalability of the IoHT system.

Keywords

References

  1. P. P. Ray, D. Dash, K. Salah, and N. Kumar, “Blockchain for iot-based healthcare: background, consensus, platforms, and use cases,” 2020.
  2. M. R. Naqvi, M. Aslam, M. W. Iqbal, S. K. Shahzad, M. Malik, and M. U. Tahir, “Study of block chain and its impact on internet of health things (ioht): challenges and opportunities,” 2020.
  3. S. M. Umran, S. Lu, Z. A. Abduljabbar, and V. O. Nyangaresi, “Multi-chain blockchain based secure datasharing framework for industrial iots smart devices in petroleum industry,” 2023.
  4. M. A. Haque, D. Sonal, S. Ahmad, and K. Kumar, “Enhancing security for internet of things based system,” 2023.
  5. Z. A. Hussien, H. Jin, Z. A. Abduljabbar, M. A. Hussain, A. A. Yassin, S. H. Abbdal, M. A. Al Sibahee, and D. Zou, “Secure and efficient e-health scheme based on the internet of things,” 2016.
  6. V. O. Nyangaresi, Z. A. Abduljabbar, J. Ma, and M. A. Al Sibahee, “Verifiable security and privacy provisioning protocol for high reliability in smart healthcare communication environment,” 2022.
  7. M. T. Hammi, P. Bellot, and A. Serhrouchni, “Bctrust: A decentralized authentication blockchain-based mechanism,” 2018.
  8. M. Jmaiel, M. Mokhtari, B. Abdulrazak, H. Aloulou, and S. Kallel, “The impact of digital technologies on public health in developed and developing countries: 18th international conference, icost 2020, hammamet, tunisia, june 24–26, 2020, proceedings,” 2020.
  9. G. Apruzzese, P. Laskov, E. Montes de Oca, W. Mallouli, L. Brdalo Rapa, A. V. Grammatopoulos, and F. Di Franco, “The role of machine learning in cybersecurity,” 2023.
  10. S. Matsumoto, R. M. Reischuk, P. Szalachowski, T. H.- J. Kim, and A. Perrig, “Authentication challenges in a global environment,” 2017.
  11. S. C. Seak, N. K. Siong, W. H. Loon, and G. R. Haron, “A centralized multimodal unified authentication platform for web-based application,” 2014.
  12. D. Nkomo and R. Brown, “Hybrid cyber security framework for the internet of medical things,” 2019.
  13. N. Deepa, Q.-V. Pham, D. C. Nguyen, S. Bhattacharya, B. Prabadevi, T. R. Gadekallu, P. K. R. Maddikunta, F. Fang, and P. N. Pathirana, “A survey on blockchain for big data: Approaches, opportunities, and future directions,” 2022.
  14. S. M. Umran, S. Lu, Z. A. Abduljabbar, Z. Lu, B. Feng, and L. Zheng, “Secure and privacy-preserving datasharing framework based on blockchain technology for al-najaf/iraq oil refinery,” 2022.
  15. H. Sheth and J. Dattani, “Overview of blockchain technology,” 2019.
  16. P. Paul, P. Aithal, R. Saavedra, and S. Ghosh, “Blockchain technology and its types—a short review,” 2021.
  17. K. Pareek, P. K. Tiwari, and V. Bhatnagar, “Fog computing in healthcare: A review,” 2021.
  18. M. T. Mohammed, A. E. Rohiem, A. El-Moghazy, and A. Ghalwash, “Chaotic based key management and public-key cryptosystem,” 2012.
  19. S. Nakamoto and A. Bitcoin, “A peer-to-peer electronic cash system,” 2008.
  20. H. Liu, H. Ning, Y. Yue, Y. Wan, and L. T. Yang, “Selective disclosure and yoking-proof based privacypreserving authentication scheme for cloud assisted wearable devices,” 2018.
  21. R. Almadhoun, M. Kadadha, M. Alhemeiri, M. Alshehhi, and K. Salah, “A user authentication scheme of iot devices using blockchain-enabled fog nodes,” 2018.
  22. Y. Liang, “Identity verification and management of electronic health records with blockchain technology,” 2019.
  23. I. T. Javed, F. Alharbi, B. Bellaj, T. Margaria, N. Crespi, and K. N. Qureshi, “Health-id: A blockchain-based decentralized identity management for remote healthcare,” 2021.
  24. I.-T. Chen, J.-M. Tsai, Y.-T. Chen, and C.-H. Lee, “Lightweight mutual authentication for healthcare iot,” 2022.
  25. O. Umoren, R. Singh, Z. Pervez, and K. Dahal, “Securing fog computing with a decentralised user authentication approach based on blockchain,” 2022.
  26. N. Alsaeed, F. Nadeem, and F. Albalwy, “A scalable and lightweight group authentication framework for internet of medical things using integrated blockchain and fog computing,” 2024.
  27. S. M. Umran, S. Lu, Z. A. Abduljabbar, J. Zhu, and J. Wu, “Secure data of industrial internet of things in a cement factory based on a blockchain technology,” 2021.
  28. C. Kim, “Ethereum 2.0: How it works and why it matters,” Coindesk: https://www. coindesk. com/wpcontent/ uploads/2020/07/ETH-2.0-072120. pdf, 2020.
  29. I. M. Coelho, V. N. Coelho, R. P. Araujo,W. Yong Qiang, and B. D. Rhodes, “Challenges of pbft-inspired consensus for blockchain and enhancements over neo dbft,” Future Internet, vol. 12, no. 8, p. 129, 2020.
  30. G. Wood et al., “Ethereum: A secure decentralised generalised transaction ledger,” Ethereum project yellow paper, vol. 151, no. 2014, pp. 1–32, 2014.
  31. F. A. Kraemer, A. E. Braten, N. Tamkittikhun, and D. Palma, “Fog computing in healthcare–a review and discussion,” 2017.
  32. P. Verma and S. K. Sood, “Fog assisted-iot enabled patient health monitoring in smart homes,” 2018.
  33. Y. Shi, G. Ding, H.Wang, H. E. Roman, and S. Lu, “The fog computing service for healthcare,” 2015.
  34. Q. Qi and F. Tao, “A smart manufacturing service system based on edge computing, fog computing, and cloud computing,” 2019.
  35. M. Lamberger and F. Mendel, “Higher-order differential attack on reduced sha-256,” 2011.
  36. L. Ismail, H. Materwala, and S. Zeadally, “Lightweight blockchain for healthcare,” 2019.
  37. N. Sangeeta and S. Y. Nam, “Blockchain and interplanetary file system (ipfs)-based data storage system for vehicular networks with keyword search capability,” 2023.
  38. L. N. Kodavali and S. Kuppuswamy, “Adaptation of blockchain using ethereum and ipfs for fog based ehealthcare activity recognition system,” 2022.
  39. F. Firouzi, S. Jiang, K. Chakrabarty, B. Farahani, M. Daneshmand, J. Song, and K. Mankodiya, “Fusion of iot, ai, edge–fog–cloud, and blockchain: Challenges, solutions, and a case study in healthcare and medicine,” 2022.
  40. A. Khatoon, “A blockchain-based smart contract system for healthcare management,” 2020.
  41. X. Li, J. Ma, and S. Moon, “On the security of the canetti-krawczyk model,” 2005.
  42. R. K. Lenka, M. R. Dey, P. Bhanse, and R. K. Barik, “Performance and load testing: Tools and challenges,” 2018.
  43. L. Kim, “Cybersecurity: Ensuring confidentiality, integrity, and availability of information,” 2022.
  44. S. Meisami, M. Beheshti-Atashgah, and M. R. Aref, “Using blockchain to achieve decentralized privacy in iot healthcare,” 2021.
  45. W. Shao, C. Jia, Y. Xu, K. Qiu, Y. Gao, and Y. He, “Attrichain: Decentralized traceable anonymous identities in privacy-preserving permissioned blockchain,” 2020.
  46. C. Esposito, M. Ficco, and B. B. Gupta, “Blockchainbased authentication and authorization for smart city applications,” 2021.
  47. Y. Imine, D. E. Kouicem, A. Bouabdallah, and A. Lounis, “Masfog: An efficient mutual authentication scheme for fog computing architecture,” 2018.