EdgeLinker: Practical Blockchain-based Framework for Healthcare Fog Applications to Enhance Security in Edge-IoT Data Communications

Abstract: The pervasive adoption of Internet of Things (IoT) has significantly advanced healthcare digitization and modernization. Nevertheless, the sensitive nature of medical data presents security and privacy challenges. On the other hand, resource constraints of IoT devices often necessitates cloud services for data handling, introducing single points of failure, processing delays, and security vulnerabilities. Meanwhile, the blockchain technology offers potential solutions for enhancing security, decentralization, and data ownership. An ideal solution should ensure confidentiality, access control, and data integrity while being scalable, cost-effective, and integrable with the existing systems. However, current blockchain-based studies only address some of these requirements. Accordingly, this paper proposes EdgeLinker; a comprehensive solution incorporating Proof-of-Authority consensus, integrating smart contracts on the Ethereum blockchain for access control, and advanced cryptographic algorithms for secure data communication between IoT edge devices and the fog layer in healthcare fog applications. This novel framework has been implemented in a real-world fog testbed, using COTS fog devices. Based on a comprehensive set of evaluations, EdgeLinker demonstrates significant improvements in security and privacy with reasonable costs, making it an affordable and practical system for healthcare fog applications. Compared with the state-of-the-art, without significant changes in the write-time to the blockchain, EdgeLinker achieves a 35% improvement in data read time. Additionally, it is able to provide better throughput in both reading and writing transactions compared to the existing studies. EdgeLinker has been also examined in terms of energy, resource consumption and channel latency in both secure and non-secure modes, which has shown remarkable improvements.