New framework for authentication and authorization for e-health service systems

The development of information technology has eased the medical services and provided the electronic health service in a way that a doctor can keep the records of patients in an information system and be informed of changes of status of patients, and make decisions promptly. However, there are increasing challenges over the privacy of patients due to the exposition of clinic information patients to ubiquitous networks. This paper introduces a framework for authentication and authorization in e-health services. It aims to build the architecture for authentication and authorisation within an e-health service system. The architecture will help to build a secure and privacy protection e-health service system. The authors hope that understanding the underlying framework will not only inform researchers of a better design for e-health service, but also assist e-health systems developers in the understanding of intricate constructions within authentication and authorisation. Further, our paper highlights the importance of protecting the privacy of medical records of patients in terms of information privacy

Capability-based Authentication and Access Control in Internet of Things

Internet of Things (IoT) foresees the interaction and communication between different physical entities, which are constrained devices in this physical world. The entities also communicate with the Internet to provide solution for different complex problems. It goes for empowering future advances and dreams like, smart apartment, building automation, intelligent city construction, and e-health service. Secure data transmission is of prime importance in these scenarios. Standard IP-based security arrangements don’t address this issue as they are not composed in view of the restrictions of obliged gadgets. Consequently, more lightweight security components are required. The entities in the domain of IoT come from different vendors. Authentication and Authorization of these entities in a network demands the exchange of identity, certificates and protocol suites. High computation power and memory is required for this transmission. We propose a framework in which the authentication, authorization and key distribution is delegated. It also integrates capability-based fine-grained access control of services. Our evaluation implements different cryptographic algorithms to manage authentication and authorization of the entities in the domain of IoT using this framework. The simulation measures the time unit taken for managing these security aspects. The framework is also tested in a hardware-based testbed and justifies that this framework might be used in most of the IoT domain

Access and information flow control to secure mobile web service compositions in resource constrained environments

The growing use of mobile web services such as electronic health records systems and applications like twitter, Facebook has increased interest in robust mechanisms for ensuring security for such information sharing services. Common security mechanisms such as access control and information flow control are either restrictive or weak in that they prevent applications from sharing data usefully, and/or allow private information leaks when used independently. Typically, when services are composed there is a resource that some or all of the services involved in the composition need to share. However, during service composition security problems arise because the resulting service is made up of different services from different security domains. A key issue that arises and that we address in this thesis is that of enforcing secure information flow control during service composition to prevent illegal access and propagation of information between the participating services. This thesis describes a model that combines access control and information flow control in one framework. We specifically consider a case study of an e-health service application, and consider how constraints like location and context dependencies impact on authentication and authorization. Furthermore, we consider how data sharing applications such as the e-health service application handle issues of unauthorized users and insecure propagation of information in resource constrained environments¹. Our framework addresses this issue of illegitimate information access and propagation by making use of the concept of program dependence graphs (PDGs). Program dependence graphs use path conditions as necessary conditions for secure information flow control. The advantage of this approach to securing information sharing is that, information is only propagated if the criteria for data sharing are verified. Our solution proposes or offers good performance, fast authentication taking into account bandwidth limitations. A security analysis shows the theoretical improvements our scheme offers. Results obtained confirm that the framework accommodates the CIA-triad (which is the confidentiality, integrity and availability model designed to guide policies of information security) of our work and can be used to motivate further research work in this field

Architecture design and access control of e-health portals

As an emerging form of enabling technology, Web-based e-Health portals provide patients easier accesses to their healthcare information and services. We design and implement such an e-Health portal which can integrate many backend medical services effectively. A major challenge in designing such a system is to meet critical security requirements, such as the confidentiality of patient data, the integrity of diagnosis results, and the availability of healthcare services. In this thesis I address the issue from the access control perspective. More specifically, I first propose a two-tier approach to access control for e-Health portals. The approach supplements existing Role Based Access Control (RBAC) capabilities with a rule-based access control module based on the classical Flexible Authorization Framework (FAF) model. I study conflict resolution and interaction between the two modules. I also address authentication for real-time services provided by remote service providers

Patient privacy protection using anonymous access control techniques

Objective: The objective of this study is to develop a solution to preserve security and privacy in a healthcare environment where health-sensitive information will be accessed by many parties and stored in various distributed databases. The solution should maintain anonymous medical records and it should be able to link anonymous medical information in distributed databases into a single patient medical record with the patient identity. Methods: In this paper we present a protocol that can be used to authenticate and authorize patients to healthcare services without providing the patient identification. Healthcare service can identify the patient using separate temporary identities in each identification session and medical records are linked to these temporary identities. Temporary identities can be used to enable record linkage and reverse track real patient identity in critical medical situations. Results: The proposed protocol provides main security and privacy services such as user anonymity, message privacy, message confidentiality, user authentication, user authorization and message replay attacks. The medical environment validates the patient at the healthcare service as a real and registered patient for the medical services. Using the proposed protocol, the patient anonymous medical records at different healthcare services can be linked into one single report and it is possible to securely reverse track anonymous patient into the real identity. Conclusion: The protocol protects the patient privacy with a secure anonymous authentication to healthcare services and medical record registries according to the European and the UK legislations, where the patient real identity is not disclosed with the distributed patient medical records

Semantic security: specification and enforcement of semantic policies for security-driven collaborations

Collaborative research can often have demands on finer-grained security that go beyond the authentication-only paradigm as typified by many e-Infrastructure/Grid based solutions. Supporting finer-grained access control is often essential for domains where the specification and subsequent enforcement of authorization policies is needed. The clinical domain is one area in particular where this is so. However it is the case that existing security authorization solutions are fragile, inflexible and difficult to establish and maintain. As a result they often do not meet the needs of real world collaborations where robustness and flexibility of policy specification and enforcement, and ease of maintenance are essential. In this paper we present results of the JISC funded Advanced Grid Authorisation through Semantic Technologies (AGAST) project (www.nesc.ac.uk/hub/projects/agast) and show how semantic-based approaches to security policy specification and enforcement can address many of the limitations with existing security solutions. These are demonstrated into the clinical trials domain through the MRC funded Virtual Organisations for Trials and Epidemiological Studies (VOTES) project (www.nesc.ac.uk/hub/projects/votes) and the epidemiological domain through the JISC funded SeeGEO project (www.nesc.ac.uk/hub/projects/seegeo)

Security oriented e-infrastructures supporting neurological research and clinical trials

The neurological and wider clinical domains stand to gain greatly from the vision of the grid in providing seamless yet secure access to distributed, heterogeneous computational resources and data sets. Whilst a wealth of clinical data exists within local, regional and national healthcare boundaries, access to and usage of these data sets demands that fine grained security is supported and subsequently enforced. This paper explores the security challenges of the e-health domain, focusing in particular on authorization. The context of these explorations is the MRC funded VOTES (Virtual Organisations for Trials and Epidemiological Studies) and the JISC funded GLASS (Glasgow early adoption of Shibboleth project) which are developing Grid infrastructures for clinical trials with case studies in the brain trauma domain