DOI: 10.17798/bitlisfen.1881470 ISSN: 2147-3129

Data Continuity in Disaster Management: Secure Patient Record Prototype with Ipfs and Hyperledger Fabric

Cihan Bayraktar
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This study presents a distributed prototype integrating IPFS and Hyperledger Fabric to ensure continuous access to healthcare data under disaster conditions. A Docker-based simulation of eight regional containers — conceptually mapped to Türkiye's geographical regions — was used to measure five transaction metrics (CID generation, DHT announcement, pinning, blockchain recording, and CID query time) under four failure scenarios (all nodes active; 1, 2, and 4 nodes disabled). In all scenarios, only regional IPFS/Flask containers were disabled; the Hyperledger Fabric peer and orderer infrastructure remained fully operational. The IPFS storage and application layer achieved 100% data access success across all tested configurations. CID generation, pinning, and blockchain recording times were consistently low, while DHT announcement latency (~14–21 s average) was the dominant component of total transaction time. Patient information access times showed no monotonic increase with rising node failures; values in failure scenarios were comparable to or lower than the all-nodes-active baseline — attributed to reduced resource contention in the single-host environment rather than genuine performance improvement. Occasional delays occurred when specific CIDs were not immediately discoverable in the DHT or pinned by remaining active nodes, highlighting the importance of dynamic pinning strategies. In the current prototype, security is enforced at the blockchain integrity and authorization layer via Hyperledger Fabric; content-level encryption at the IPFS layer has not been implemented and is identified as future work. The study validates the architectural feasibility of the proposed system under controlled conditions and recommends validation under real geographic distribution, network latency modeling, and advanced security mechanisms.

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