Thinking Out of the Blocks: Holochain for Distributed Security in IoT Healthcare

The Internet-of-Things (IoT) is an emerging and cognitive technology which connects a massive number of smart physical devices with virtual objects operating in diverse platforms through the internet. IoT is increasingly being implemented in distributed settings, making footprints in almost every sector of our life. Unfortunately, for healthcare systems, the entities connected to the IoT networks are exposed to an unprecedented level of security threats. Relying on a huge volume of sensitive and personal data, IoT healthcare systems are facing unique challenges in protecting data security and privacy. Although blockchain has posed to be the solution in this scenario thanks to its inherent distributed ledger technology (DLT), it suffers from major setbacks of increasing storage and computation requirements with the network size. This paper proposes a holochain-based security and privacy-preserving framework for IoT healthcare systems that overcomes these challenges and is particularly suited for resource constrained IoT scenarios. The performance and thorough security analyses demonstrate that a holochain-based IoT healthcare system is significantly better compared to blockchain and other existing systems.