26,498 research outputs found
Tool support for security-oriented virtual research collaborations
Collaboration is at the heart of e-Science and e-Research
more generally. Successful collaborations must address both
the needs of the end user researchers and the providers
that make resources available. Usability and security are
two fundamental requirements that are demanded by many
collaborations and both concerns must be considered from
both the researcher and resource provider perspective. In
this paper we outline tools and methods developed at the
National e-Science Centre (NeSC) that provide users with
seamless, secure access to distributed resources through
security-oriented research environments, whilst also allowing resource providers to define and enforce their own local access and usage policies through intuitive user interfaces. We describe these tools and illustrate their application in the ESRC-funded Data Management through e-Social Science (DAMES) and the JISC-funded SeeGEO projects
Authorised Translations of Electronic Documents
A concept is proposed to extend authorised translations of documents to
electronically signed, digital documents. Central element of the solution is an
electronic seal, embodied as an XML data structure, which attests to the
correctness of the translation and the authorisation of the translator. The
seal contains a digital signature binding together original and translated
document, thus enabling forensic inspection and therefore legal security in the
appropriation of the translation. Organisational aspects of possible
implementation variants of electronic authorised translations are discussed and
a realisation as a stand-alone web-service is presented.Comment: In: Peer-reviewed Proceedings of the Information Security South
Africa (ISSA) 2006 From Insight to Foresight Conference, 5 to 7 July 2006,
Sandton, South Afric
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)
Shibboleth-based access to and usage of grid resources
Security underpins grids and e-research. Without a robust, reliable and simple grid security infrastructure combined with commonly accepted security practices, large portions of the research community and wider industry will not engage. The predominant way in which security is currently addressed in the grid community is through public key infrastructures (PKI) based upon X.509 certificates to support authentication. Whilst PKIs address user identity issues, authentication does not provide fine grained control over what users are allowed to do on remote resources (authorization). In this paper we outline how we have successfully combined Shibboleth and advanced authorization technologies to provide simplified (from the user perspective) but fine grained security for access to and usage of grid resources. We demonstrate this approach through different security focused e-science projects being conducted at the National e-Science Centre (NeSC) at the University of Glasgow. We believe that this model is widely applicable and encourage the further uptake of e-science by non-IT specialists in the research communitie
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PKI security in large-scale healthcare networks
During the past few years a lot of PKI (Public Key Infrastructures) infrastructures have been proposed for healthcare networks in order to ensure secure communication services and exchange of data among healthcare professionals. However, there is a plethora of challenges in these healthcare PKI infrastructures. Especially, there are a lot of challenges for PKI infrastructures deployed over large-scale healthcare networks. In this paper, we propose a PKI infrastructure to ensure security in a large-scale Internet-based healthcare network connecting a wide spectrum of healthcare units geographically distributed within a wide region. Furthermore, the proposed PKI infrastructure facilitates the trust issues that arise in a large-scale healthcare network including multi-domain PKI infrastructures
NEW SECURE SOLUTIONS FOR PRIVACY AND ACCESS CONTROL IN HEALTH INFORMATION EXCHANGE
In the current digital age, almost every healthcare organization (HCO) has moved from storing patient health records on paper to storing them electronically. Health Information Exchange (HIE) is the ability to share (or transfer) patients’ health information between different HCOs while maintaining national security standards like the Health Insurance Portability and Accountability Act (HIPAA) of 1996. Over the past few years, research has been conducted to develop privacy and access control frameworks for HIE systems. The goal of this dissertation is to address the privacy and access control concerns by building practical and efficient HIE frameworks to secure the sharing of patients’ health information.
The first solution allows secure HIE among different healthcare providers while focusing primarily on the privacy of patients’ information. It allows patients to authorize a certain type of health information to be retrieved, which helps prevent any unintentional leakage of information. The privacy solution also provides healthcare providers with the capability of mutual authentication and patient authentication. It also ensures the integrity and auditability of health information being exchanged. The security and performance study for the first protocol shows that it is efficient for the purpose of HIE and offers a high level of security for such exchanges.
The second framework presents a new cloud-based protocol for access control to facilitate HIE across different HCOs, employing a trapdoor hash-based proxy signature in a novel manner to enable secure (authenticated and authorized) on-demand access to patient records. The proposed proxy signature-based scheme provides an explicit mechanism for patients to authorize the sharing of specific medical information with specific HCOs, which helps prevent any undesired or unintentional leakage of health information. The scheme also ensures that such authorizations are authentic with respect to both the HCOs and the patient. Moreover, the use of proxy signatures simplifies security auditing and the ability to obtain support for investigations by providing non-repudiation. Formal definitions, security specifications, and a detailed theoretical analysis, including correctness, security, and performance of both frameworks are provided which demonstrate the improvements upon other existing HIE systems
E-infrastructures fostering multi-centre collaborative research into the intensive care management of patients with brain injury
Clinical research is becoming ever more collaborative with multi-centre trials now a common practice. With this in mind, never has it been more important to have secure access to data and, in so doing, tackle the challenges of inter-organisational data access and usage. This is especially the case for research conducted within the brain injury domain due to the complicated multi-trauma nature of the disease with its associated complex collation of time-series data of varying resolution and quality. It is now widely accepted that advances in treatment within this group of patients will only be delivered if the technical infrastructures underpinning the collection and validation of multi-centre research data for clinical trials is improved. In recognition of this need, IT-based multi-centre e-Infrastructures such as the Brain Monitoring with Information Technology group (BrainIT - www.brainit.org) and Cooperative Study on Brain Injury Depolarisations (COSBID - www.cosbid.de) have been formed. A serious impediment to the effective implementation of these networks is access to the know-how and experience needed to install, deploy and manage security-oriented middleware systems that provide secure access to distributed hospital based datasets and especially the linkage of these data sets across sites. The recently funded EU framework VII ICT project Advanced Arterial Hypotension Adverse Event prediction through a Novel Bayesian Neural Network (AVERT-IT) is focused upon tackling these challenges. This chapter describes the problems inherent to data collection within the brain injury medical domain, the current IT-based solutions designed to address these problems and how they perform in practice. We outline how the authors have collaborated towards developing Grid solutions to address the major technical issues. Towards this end we describe a prototype solution which ultimately formed the basis for the AVERT-IT project. We describe the design of the underlying Grid infrastructure for AVERT-IT and how it will be used to produce novel approaches to data collection, data validation and clinical trial design is also presented
Data Minimisation in Communication Protocols: A Formal Analysis Framework and Application to Identity Management
With the growing amount of personal information exchanged over the Internet,
privacy is becoming more and more a concern for users. One of the key
principles in protecting privacy is data minimisation. This principle requires
that only the minimum amount of information necessary to accomplish a certain
goal is collected and processed. "Privacy-enhancing" communication protocols
have been proposed to guarantee data minimisation in a wide range of
applications. However, currently there is no satisfactory way to assess and
compare the privacy they offer in a precise way: existing analyses are either
too informal and high-level, or specific for one particular system. In this
work, we propose a general formal framework to analyse and compare
communication protocols with respect to privacy by data minimisation. Privacy
requirements are formalised independent of a particular protocol in terms of
the knowledge of (coalitions of) actors in a three-layer model of personal
information. These requirements are then verified automatically for particular
protocols by computing this knowledge from a description of their
communication. We validate our framework in an identity management (IdM) case
study. As IdM systems are used more and more to satisfy the increasing need for
reliable on-line identification and authentication, privacy is becoming an
increasingly critical issue. We use our framework to analyse and compare four
identity management systems. Finally, we discuss the completeness and
(re)usability of the proposed framework
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