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BMPLS: Blockchain-Based Multi-level Privacy-Preserving Location Sharing Scheme for Telecare Medical Information Systems

  • Mobile & Wireless Health
  • Published:
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Abstract

The sharing of patients’ locations is an important part in mobile medical services and modern smart healthcare. Although location sharing based on blockchains has advantages on decentralization and openness, there is also a challenge to guarantee the security and the privacy of locations recorded in a blockchain. To this end, this paper investigates the location sharing based on blockchains for telecare medical information systems. Firstly, we define the basic requirements of blockchain-based location sharing including decentralization, unforgeability, confidentiality, multi-level privacy protection, retrievability and verifiability. Then, using order-preserving encryption and merkle tree, we propose a blockchain-based multi-level location sharing scheme, i.e. BMPLS. The analysis results show that our scheme satisfies the above requirements. Finally, the performance of our scheme is evaluated and the experiment results show that our scheme is efficient and feasible for both patients and medical workers. In a word, our scheme can be applied to realize privacy-preserving location sharing based on blockchains for telecare medical information systems.

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Funding

This study was funded by National Natural Science Foundation of China (61472310, U1536202, U1405255, 61672413, 61672415, 61671360, 61602360, 61702404), the China 111 project (grant B16037).

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. School of Cyber Engineering, Xidian University, Xi’an, 710071, China

    Yaxian Ji, Junwei Zhang, Jianfeng Ma & Chao Yang

  2. School of Software, Central South University, Changsha, 410075, China

    Xin Yao

Authors
  1. Yaxian Ji
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  2. Junwei Zhang
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  3. Jianfeng Ma
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  4. Chao Yang
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  5. Xin Yao
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Corresponding author

Correspondence to Junwei Zhang.

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The authors declare that they have no conflict of interest.

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This article does not contain any studies with human participants or animals performed by any of the authors.

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This article is part of the Topical Collection on Blockchain-based Medical Data Management System: Security and Privacy Challenges and Opportunities

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Ji, Y., Zhang, J., Ma, J. et al. BMPLS: Blockchain-Based Multi-level Privacy-Preserving Location Sharing Scheme for Telecare Medical Information Systems. J Med Syst 42, 147 (2018). https://doi.org/10.1007/s10916-018-0998-2

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  • DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s10916-018-0998-2

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