A Blockchain-Based Secure Framework for Homomorphic AI in IoHT for Tackling COVID-19 Pandemic

Pandemics like COVID-19 have posed new challenges in the healthcare sector around the world. Artificial Intelligence (AI) and the Internet of Healthcare Things (IoHT) have been widely used to combat the recent pandemic and provide assistance to the population. Security concerns in international cooperation impede the advancement of AI in IoHT services. Arguably, the confidentiality of data, the technology edge of AI providers, integrity, and availability of service are the primary concerns. To this end, in this chapter, we have proposed a blockchain-based secure framework for homomorphic AI in IoHT networks to handle security concerns. In this framework, we focus on AI as the core computation of IoHT networks. The proposed framework is based on blockchain technology and distributed storage to ensure integrity and availability in a decentralized network. The proposed framework uses homomorphic encryption to enable privacy-preserving computation, mainly AI services. Moreover, the security analysis of this framework shows that it is formally provable to meet the defined security requirements. We present a use case for diagnosing and monitoring COVID-19 during a pandemic in order to evaluate the proposed framework.