ISO/IEEE 11073 service-oriented device connectivity (SDC) is a new standard for manufacturer-independent medical device-to-device interoperability. To analyse the workflow and track errors during patient treatment, it is important to securely protect the data from tampering, deletion and access by unauthorized third parties. This project uses an eco-friendly blockchain technology and public key encryption to handle the security concerns.
The whole project SDC Blockchain Logger is open source and consists of three applications for different tasks:
- SDC Log Explorer to display, filter and browse through the log.
- SDC Sniffer to sniff SDC messages between medical devices.
- SDC Data Safe to handle permissions and storage on blockchain.
This application is a smart contract to manage permissions and storage on blockchain.
- Install Docker.
- Install EOS Studio.
In EOS Studio
- Install EOSIO and EOSIO.CDT with EOS Studio.
- Create a local blockchain, start it and create accounts for the contract, a scope and two users.
- Open this project Data Safe, compile it and deploy it to the contract account.
- Select the scope account and open the deployed contract of this account. There select the action permission.
- Add a user with storing permission by entering the scope name, the user name, true for storing and false for reading in the corresponding inputs.
- Add another user with reading permission. Therefore enter false for storing and true for reading.
- Select the action setreadkey enter the scope name, user name and a public PGP key of this user. The user can upload a public key by himself, but then the scope account have to verify it by sending the setreadkey with empty readpublickey input
Finished
- Now you can add the applied parameters for the Sniffer and Log Explorer. The sniffer needs an user account with storing permission and the Log Explorer can be used with an user account with reading permission.
Data Safe can be executed on EOSIO blockchains. This type of blockchain can run as a private, consortium or decentralized blockchain. EOSIO uses delegated proof of stack (sPoS), an eco-friendly and fast alternative to proof of work (PoW). DPoS is usually considered more centralized than PoW, but in medical technology this could be an advantage. By distribution of tokens, certain institutions or authorities for regulation can granted more voting power in the network.
An overview of the components for handling EOSIO blockchains can be seen in the picture.
The grouping is shown in the following picture. Data Safe is a Contract that runs on a blockchain. By using different contract names, a blockchain can provide several Data Safe contracts. Each Data Safe contract provide several scopes. Each scope can handle several users. Contract, scope and user are defined by EOSIO account names.
For example: A hospital association runs a private blockchain and uses the contract name datasafe. Each hospital in this association has an own scope like ac.hospital1, ac.hospital2 etc.
Each running sniffer has its own user account. If there is only one sniffer for each operating room they may be called op.room1, op.room2 etc.
The data content is uploaded to the blockchain by transactions. In addition to the chaining of blocks, the transactions have an internal chaining, too. Each new transaction refers to the last transaction by this user with the same scope and contract. EOSIO blockchains have the blockchain resource EOSIO RAM for fast queries. The last transaction with its reference is saved in this RAM. An illustration is shown in the picture and see SavAct's SavWeb which uses a similar storing method for decentralised websites on blockchain.
The whole project is open source and free to use, see MIT licence. If you want to work on this project, feel free to contact me or push some improvements.