A Blockchain-Based Secure Sharing Scheme for Electrical Impedance Tomography Data

Real-time electrical impedance tomography (EIT) data sharing is becoming increasingly necessary, due to the extensive use of EIT technology in various sectors, including material analysis, biomedicine, and industrial process monitoring. The prevalence of portable EIT equipment and remote imaging technology has led to a predominance of centralized storage, Internet protocol transmission, and certificates from certificate authorities (CA) in telemedicine data. This has resulted in compromised data security, network communication delays, high CA maintenance costs, increased risks of medical data privacy breaches, and low security. Therefore, this paper offers a consortia blockchain-based method for exchanging EIT data that addresses security and integrity concerns during data storage and exchange, while maintaining transparency and traceability. Proprietary re-encryption techniques are employed to guarantee traceability when exchanging anonymous data, enabling precise control over data access. This scheme serves to protect both data and identity privacy, as well as to trace the actual identity of potential malicious users, while also thwarting any coordinated efforts between partially trusted parties and data requesters seeking unauthorized access to confidential information. Additionally, a combination of blockchain and InterPlanetary File System (IPFS) distributed storage technology is utilized to ease the burden of EIT data storage. The feasibility and effectiveness of the proposed solution were validated through a series of experiments, demonstrating its ability to effectively prevent data tampering and misuse, reduce data management costs, and enhance the efficiency and quality of data sharing.