Department of Informatics, Ionian University, Corfu, Greece.
Computer Engineering and Informatics Department, University of Patras, Patras, Greece.
Adv Exp Med Biol. 2020;1194:389-396. doi: 10.1007/978-3-030-32622-7_36.
Blockchain is a linearly linked, distributed, and very robust data structure. Originally proposed as part of the Bitcoin distributed stack, it can be applied in a number of fields, most notably in smart contracts, social media, secure IoT, and cryptocurrency mining. It ensures data integrity by distributing strongly encrypted data in widely redundant segments. Each new insertion requires verification and approval by the majority of the users of the blockchain. Both encryption and verification are computationally intensive tasks which cannot be solved with ordinary off-the-shelf CPUs. This has resulted in a renewed scientific interest in secure distributed communication and coordination protocols. Mobile health applications are growing progressively popular and have the enormous advantage of timely diagnosis of certain conditions. However, privacy concerns have been raised as mobile health applications by default have access to highly sensitive personal data. This chapter presents concisely how blockchain can be applied to mobile health applications in order to enhance privacy.
区块链是一种线性链接、分布式且非常强大的数据结构。它最初是作为比特币分布式堆栈的一部分提出的,可应用于多个领域,尤其是智能合约、社交媒体、安全的物联网和加密货币挖矿。它通过在广泛冗余的段中分发强加密数据来确保数据完整性。每个新的插入都需要区块链的大多数用户进行验证和批准。加密和解密都是计算密集型任务,普通的现成 CPU 无法解决这些任务。这导致人们对安全的分布式通信和协调协议重新产生了科学兴趣。移动健康应用程序越来越受欢迎,它们具有及时诊断某些疾病的巨大优势。然而,由于移动健康应用程序默认访问高度敏感的个人数据,因此引发了隐私问题。本章简洁地介绍了如何将区块链应用于移动健康应用程序以增强隐私性。