Page 343 - Special Topic Session (STS) - Volume 4

STS1080 Asma A. et al.
Despite this, the industry still seems to be an “easy target” for hackers and
this is due to the lack of technological understanding within the industry. This
can be seen by the number of attacks and vulnerabilities exploited within the
targeted systems, such as phishing attacks, which are successful in retrieving
personal data. Moreover, the high success of some attacks such as
ransomware, has shown the lack of basic security measures such as backup
and system updates. These attacks not only affect patients’ privacy and
security, but it also affect the institutions themselves, and many financial and
reputation damage have been caused. As these attacks become more
common and easy to perform, there is an urgent need for robust and reliable
ways to ensure data security, confidentiality, integrity and availability to
authorised users only. Various institutions have been looking into cloud-based
technology and various kinds of encryption techniques. But In the last few
years, Blockchain technology has been highly suggested and acclaimed as one
of the best solutions to solve the security issues in healthcare applications and
others. Blockchain is based on a peer-to-peer distributed and decentralised
architecture which puts emphasis on value and trust rather than the exchange
of information (Ahmad 2019).
The incorporation of blockchain seems to be in line with the GDPRs goal
of protecting data by giving control to the users and using hashes and
consensus to keep data integrity and consistency. This has been driven only
by the success that Bitcoin has achieved, as no other applications has been
fully deployed on Blockchain. Many researchers, and Blockchain developers
believe that blockchain is the horizontal innovation needed to transform
various industries. Even though blockchain has been heavily linked to the
healthcare industry, there is a lack of research into what existing blockchains
could be used for the industry. The purpose of this study is to carry out a deep
analysis of blockchain and conclude whether it’s a suitable technology for the
healthcare industry via simple tests.

1.1. Security issues in healthcare applications
Healthcare is very sensitive as it directly involves personal data, which must
be secured from unauthorized access from the attackers. In this section, we
discuss different major security issues along with recent incidents in the
healthcare industry. According to GDPR regulations, medical data should be
held by data controllers due to the sensitive nature involved. Currently,
medical data is passed on only to concerned department, if consent is gained
via proper channel. The law defines these genuine needs as the notification of
new births; potential epidemic or pandemic break out; an issue by formal court
order and serious crime has been committed. Even though legislation is
improving in term of data management, medical records are still at risk to
security breaches. Personal data such as names, addresses, Medicare numbers
and social security numbers are extremely wanted in the black market.

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