Audit-based Compliance Control (AC2) for EHR Systems

Traditionally, medical data is stored and processed using paper-based files. Recently, medical facilities have started to store, access and exchange medical data in digital form. The drivers for this change are mainly demands for cost reduction, and higher quality of health care. The main concerns when dealing with medical data are availability and confidentiality. Unavailability (even temporary) of medical data is expensive. Physicians may not be able to diagnose patients correctly, or they may have to repeat exams, adding to the overall costs of health care. In extreme cases availability of medical data can even be a matter of life or death. On the other hand, confidentiality of medical data is also important. Legislation requires medical facilities to observe the privacy of the patients, and states that patients have a final say on whether or not their medical data can be processed or not. Moreover, if physicians, or their EHR systems, are not trusted by the patients, for instance because of frequent privacy breaches, then patients may refuse to submit (correct) information, complicating the work of the physicians greatly. \ud \ud In traditional data protection systems, confidentiality and availability are conflicting requirements. The more data protection methods are applied to shield data from outsiders the more likely it becomes that authorized persons will not get access to the data in time. Consider for example, a password verification service that is temporarily not available, an access pass that someone forgot to bring, and so on. In this report we discuss a novel approach to data protection, Audit-based Compliance Control (AC2), and we argue that it is particularly suited for application in EHR systems. In AC2, a-priori access control is minimized to the mere authentication of users and objects, and their basic authorizations. More complex security procedures, such as checking user compliance to policies, are performed a-posteriori by using a formal and automated auditing mechanism. To support our claim we discuss legislation concerning the processing of health records, and we formalize a scenario involving medical personnel and a basic EHR system to show how AC2 can be used in practice. \ud \ud This report is based on previous work (Dekker & Etalle 2006) where we assessed the applicability of a-posteriori access control in a health care scenario. A more technically detailed article about AC2 recently appeared in the IJIS journal, where we focussed however on collaborative work environments (Cederquist, Corin, Dekker, Etalle, & Hartog, 2007). In this report we first provide background and related work before explaining the principal components of the AC2 framework. Moreover we model a detailed EHR case study to show its operation in practice. We conclude by discussing how this framework meets current trends in healthcare and by highlighting the main advantages and drawbacks of using an a-posteriori access control mechanism as opposed to more traditional access control mechanisms

Multimedia delivery in the future internet

The term “Networked Media” implies that all kinds of media including text, image, 3D graphics, audio and video are produced, distributed, shared, managed and consumed on-line through various networks, like the Internet, Fiber, WiFi, WiMAX, GPRS, 3G and so on, in a convergent manner [1]. This white paper is the contribution of the Media Delivery Platform (MDP) cluster and aims to cover the Networked challenges of the Networked Media in the transition to the Future of the Internet. Internet has evolved and changed the way we work and live. End users of the Internet have been confronted with a bewildering range of media, services and applications and of technological innovations concerning media formats, wireless networks, terminal types and capabilities. And there is little evidence that the pace of this innovation is slowing. Today, over one billion of users access the Internet on regular basis, more than 100 million users have downloaded at least one (multi)media file and over 47 millions of them do so regularly, searching in more than 160 Exabytes1 of content. In the near future these numbers are expected to exponentially rise. It is expected that the Internet content will be increased by at least a factor of 6, rising to more than 990 Exabytes before 2012, fuelled mainly by the users themselves. Moreover, it is envisaged that in a near- to mid-term future, the Internet will provide the means to share and distribute (new) multimedia content and services with superior quality and striking flexibility, in a trusted and personalized way, improving citizens’ quality of life, working conditions, edutainment and safety. In this evolving environment, new transport protocols, new multimedia encoding schemes, cross-layer inthe network adaptation, machine-to-machine communication (including RFIDs), rich 3D content as well as community networks and the use of peer-to-peer (P2P) overlays are expected to generate new models of interaction and cooperation, and be able to support enhanced perceived quality-of-experience (PQoE) and innovative applications “on the move”, like virtual collaboration environments, personalised services/ media, virtual sport groups, on-line gaming, edutainment. In this context, the interaction with content combined with interactive/multimedia search capabilities across distributed repositories, opportunistic P2P networks and the dynamic adaptation to the characteristics of diverse mobile terminals are expected to contribute towards such a vision. Based on work that has taken place in a number of EC co-funded projects, in Framework Program 6 (FP6) and Framework Program 7 (FP7), a group of experts and technology visionaries have voluntarily contributed in this white paper aiming to describe the status, the state-of-the art, the challenges and the way ahead in the area of Content Aware media delivery platforms

Trustworthy content push

Delivery of content to mobile devices gains increasing importance in industrial environments to support employees in the field. An important application are e-mail push services like the fashionable Blackberry. These systems are facing security challenges regarding data transport to, and storage of the data on the end user equipment. The emerging Trusted Computing technology offers new answers to these open questions.Comment: 4 pages, 4 eps figure

Open-TEE - An Open Virtual Trusted Execution Environment

Hardware-based Trusted Execution Environments (TEEs) are widely deployed in mobile devices. Yet their use has been limited primarily to applications developed by the device vendors. Recent standardization of TEE interfaces by GlobalPlatform (GP) promises to partially address this problem by enabling GP-compliant trusted applications to run on TEEs from different vendors. Nevertheless ordinary developers wishing to develop trusted applications face significant challenges. Access to hardware TEE interfaces are difficult to obtain without support from vendors. Tools and software needed to develop and debug trusted applications may be expensive or non-existent. In this paper, we describe Open-TEE, a virtual, hardware-independent TEE implemented in software. Open-TEE conforms to GP specifications. It allows developers to develop and debug trusted applications with the same tools they use for developing software in general. Once a trusted application is fully debugged, it can be compiled for any actual hardware TEE. Through performance measurements and a user study we demonstrate that Open-TEE is efficient and easy to use. We have made Open- TEE freely available as open source.Comment: Author's version of article to appear in 14th IEEE International Conference on Trust, Security and Privacy in Computing and Communications, TrustCom 2015, Helsinki, Finland, August 20-22, 201

Supporting security-oriented, collaborative nanoCMOS electronics research

Grid technologies support collaborative e-Research typified by multiple institutions and resources seamlessly shared to tackle common research problems. The rules for collaboration and resource sharing are commonly achieved through establishment and management of virtual organizations (VOs) where policies on access and usage of resources by collaborators are defined and enforced by sites involved in the collaboration. The expression and enforcement of these rules is made through access control systems where roles/privileges are defined and associated with individuals as digitally signed attribute certificates which collaborating sites then use to authorize access to resources. Key to this approach is that the roles are assigned to the right individuals in the VO; the attribute certificates are only presented to the appropriate resources in the VO; it is transparent to the end user researchers, and finally that it is manageable for resource providers and administrators in the collaboration. In this paper, we present a security model and implementation improving the overall usability and security of resources used in Grid-based e-Research collaborations through exploitation of the Internet2 Shibboleth technology. This is explored in the context of a major new security focused project at the National e-Science Centre (NeSC) at the University of Glasgow in the nanoCMOS electronics domain

Integrating security solutions to support nanoCMOS electronics research

The UK Engineering and Physical Sciences Research Council (EPSRC) funded Meeting the Design Challenges of nanoCMOS Electronics (nanoCMOS) is developing a research infrastructure for collaborative electronics research across multiple institutions in the UK with especially strong industrial and commercial involvement. Unlike other domains, the electronics industry is driven by the necessity of protecting the intellectual property of the data, designs and software associated with next generation electronics devices and therefore requires fine-grained security. Similarly, the project also demands seamless access to large scale high performance compute resources for atomic scale device simulations and the capability to manage the hundreds of thousands of files and the metadata associated with these simulations. Within this context, the project has explored a wide range of authentication and authorization infrastructures facilitating compute resource access and providing fine-grained security over numerous distributed file stores and files. We conclude that no single security solution meets the needs of the project. This paper describes the experiences of applying X.509-based certificates and public key infrastructures, VOMS, PERMIS, Kerberos and the Internet2 Shibboleth technologies for nanoCMOS security. We outline how we are integrating these solutions to provide a complete end-end security framework meeting the demands of the nanoCMOS electronics domain