35 research outputs found
Security and usability of a personalized user authentication paradigm : insights from a longitudinal study with three healthcare organizations
Funding information: This research has been partially supported by the EU Horizon 2020 Grant 826278 "Securing Medical Data in Smart Patient-Centric Healthcare Systems" (Serums) , and the Research and Innovation Foundation (Project DiversePass: COMPLEMENTARY/0916/0182).This paper proposes a user-adaptable and personalized authentication paradigm for healthcare organizations, which anticipates to seamlessly reflect patients’ episodic and autobiographical memories to graphical and textual passwords aiming to improve the security strength of user-selected passwords and provide a positive user experience. We report on a longitudinal study that spanned over three years in which three public European healthcare organizations participated in order to design and evaluate the aforementioned paradigm. Three studies were conducted (n=169) with different stakeholders: i) a verification study aiming to identify existing authentication practices of the three healthcare organizations with diverse stakeholders (n=9); ii) a patient-centric feasibility study during which users interacted with the proposed authentication system (n=68); and iii) a human guessing attack study focusing on vulnerabilities among people sharing common experiences within location-aware images used for graphical passwords (n=92). Results revealed that the suggested paradigm scored high with regards to users’ likeability, perceived security, usability and trust, but more importantly it assists the creation of more secure passwords. On the downside, the suggested paradigm introduces password guessing vulnerabilities by individuals sharing common experiences with the end-users. Findings are expected to scaffold the design of more patient-centric knowledge-based authentication mechanisms within nowadays dynamic computation realms.PostprintPeer reviewe
A Comprehensive Review on Medical Image Steganography Based on LSB Technique and Potential Challenges
The rapid development of telemedicine services and the requirements for exchanging medical information between physicians, consultants, and health institutions have made the protection of patients’ information an important priority for any future e-health system. The protection of medical information, including the cover (i.e. medical image), has a specificity that slightly differs from the requirements for protecting other information. It is necessary to preserve the cover greatly due to its importance on the reception side as medical staff use this information to provide a diagnosis to save a patient's life. If the cover is tampered with, this leads to failure in achieving the goal of telemedicine. Therefore, this work provides an investigation of information security techniques in medical imaging, focusing on security goals. Encrypting a message before hiding them gives an extra layer of security, and thus, will provide an excellent solution to protect the sensitive information of patients during the sharing of medical information. Medical image steganography is a special case of image steganography, while Digital Imaging and Communications in Medicine (DICOM) is the backbone of all medical imaging divisions, whereby it is most broadly used to store and transmit medical images. The main objective of this study is to provide a general idea of what Least Significant Bit-based (LSB) steganography techniques have achieved in medical images
Performance evaluation of cooperation strategies for m-health services and applications
Health telematics are becoming a major improvement for patients’ lives, especially for
disabled, elderly, and chronically ill people. Information and communication technologies have
rapidly grown along with the mobile Internet concept of anywhere and anytime connection.
In this context, Mobile Health (m-Health) proposes healthcare services delivering, overcoming
geographical, temporal and even organizational barriers. Pervasive and m-Health services aim
to respond several emerging problems in health services, including the increasing number of
chronic diseases related to lifestyle, high costs in existing national health services, the need
to empower patients and families to self-care and manage their own healthcare, and the need
to provide direct access to health services, regardless the time and place. Mobile Health (m-
Health) systems include the use of mobile devices and applications that interact with patients
and caretakers. However, mobile devices have several constraints (such as, processor, energy,
and storage resource limitations), affecting the quality of service and user experience. Architectures
based on mobile devices and wireless communications presents several challenged issues
and constraints, such as, battery and storage capacity, broadcast constraints, interferences, disconnections,
noises, limited bandwidths, and network delays. In this sense, cooperation-based
approaches are presented as a solution to solve such limitations, focusing on increasing network
connectivity, communication rates, and reliability. Cooperation is an important research topic
that has been growing in recent years. With the advent of wireless networks, several recent
studies present cooperation mechanisms and algorithms as a solution to improve wireless networks
performance. In the absence of a stable network infrastructure, mobile nodes cooperate
with each other performing all networking functionalities. For example, it can support intermediate
nodes forwarding packets between two distant nodes.
This Thesis proposes a novel cooperation strategy for m-Health services and applications.
This reputation-based scheme uses a Web-service to handle all the nodes reputation and networking
permissions. Its main goal is to provide Internet services to mobile devices without
network connectivity through cooperation with neighbor devices. Therefore resolving the above
mentioned network problems and resulting in a major improvement for m-Health network architectures
performances. A performance evaluation of this proposal through a real network
scenario demonstrating and validating this cooperative scheme using a real m-Health application
is presented. A cryptography solution for m-Health applications under cooperative environments,
called DE4MHA, is also proposed and evaluated using the same real network scenario and
the same m-Health application. Finally, this work proposes, a generalized cooperative application
framework, called MobiCoop, that extends the incentive-based cooperative scheme for
m-Health applications for all mobile applications. Its performance evaluation is also presented
through a real network scenario demonstrating and validating MobiCoop using different mobile
applications