Talent Is Ready: Promising Practices for Helping Immigrant Professionals

Outlines the need to better integrate highly skilled immigrants into the workforce, promising practices in assessment and advising, skill building, and organizational capacity building; and tips and insights for nonprofits, funders, and policy makers

Contributions to the privacy provisioning for federated identity management platforms

Identity information, personal data and user’s profiles are key assets for organizations and companies by becoming the use of identity management (IdM) infrastructures a prerequisite for most companies, since IdM systems allow them to perform their business transactions by sharing information and customizing services for several purposes in more efficient and effective ways. Due to the importance of the identity management paradigm, a lot of work has been done so far resulting in a set of standards and specifications. According to them, under the umbrella of the IdM paradigm a person’s digital identity can be shared, linked and reused across different domains by allowing users simple session management, etc. In this way, users’ information is widely collected and distributed to offer new added value services and to enhance availability. Whereas these new services have a positive impact on users’ life, they also bring privacy problems. To manage users’ personal data, while protecting their privacy, IdM systems are the ideal target where to deploy privacy solutions, since they handle users’ attribute exchange. Nevertheless, current IdM models and specifications do not sufficiently address comprehensive privacy mechanisms or guidelines, which enable users to better control over the use, divulging and revocation of their online identities. These are essential aspects, specially in sensitive environments where incorrect and unsecured management of user’s data may lead to attacks, privacy breaches, identity misuse or frauds. Nowadays there are several approaches to IdM that have benefits and shortcomings, from the privacy perspective. In this thesis, the main goal is contributing to the privacy provisioning for federated identity management platforms. And for this purpose, we propose a generic architecture that extends current federation IdM systems. We have mainly focused our contributions on health care environments, given their particularly sensitive nature. The two main pillars of the proposed architecture, are the introduction of a selective privacy-enhanced user profile management model and flexibility in revocation consent by incorporating an event-based hybrid IdM approach, which enables to replace time constraints and explicit revocation by activating and deactivating authorization rights according to events. The combination of both models enables to deal with both online and offline scenarios, as well as to empower the user role, by letting her to bring together identity information from different sources. Regarding user’s consent revocation, we propose an implicit revocation consent mechanism based on events, that empowers a new concept, the sleepyhead credentials, which is issued only once and would be used any time. Moreover, we integrate this concept in IdM systems supporting a delegation protocol and we contribute with the definition of mathematical model to determine event arrivals to the IdM system and how they are managed to the corresponding entities, as well as its integration with the most widely deployed specification, i.e., Security Assertion Markup Language (SAML). In regard to user profile management, we define a privacy-awareness user profile management model to provide efficient selective information disclosure. With this contribution a service provider would be able to accesses the specific personal information without being able to inspect any other details and keeping user control of her data by controlling who can access. The structure that we consider for the user profile storage is based on extensions of Merkle trees allowing for hash combining that would minimize the need of individual verification of elements along a path. An algorithm for sorting the tree as we envision frequently accessed attributes to be closer to the root (minimizing the access’ time) is also provided. Formal validation of the above mentioned ideas has been carried out through simulations and the development of prototypes. Besides, dissemination activities were performed in projects, journals and conferences.Programa Oficial de Doctorado en Ingeniería TelemáticaPresidente: María Celeste Campo Vázquez.- Secretario: María Francisca Hinarejos Campos.- Vocal: Óscar Esparza Martí

An Event Driven Hybrid Identity Management Approach to Privacy Enhanced e-Health

Credential-based authorization offers interesting advantages for ubiquitous scenarios involving limited devices such as sensors and personal mobile equipment: the verification can be done locally; it offers a more reduced computational cost than its competitors for issuing, storing, and verification; and it naturally supports rights delegation. The main drawback is the revocation of rights. Revocation requires handling potentially large revocation lists, or using protocols to check the revocation status, bringing extra communication costs not acceptable for sensors and other limited devices. Moreover, the effective revocation consent—considered as a privacy rule in sensitive scenarios—has not been fully addressed.This paper proposes an event-based mechanism empowering a new concept, the sleepyhead credentials, which allows to substitute time constraints and explicit revocation by activating and deactivating authorization rights according to events. Our approach is to integrate this concept in IdM systems in a hybrid model supporting delegation, which can be an interesting alternative for scenarios where revocation of consent and user privacy are critical. The delegation includes a SAML compliant protocol, which we have validated through a proof-of-concept implementation. This article also explains the mathematical model describing the event-based model and offers estimations of the overhead introduced by the system. The paper focus on health care scenarios, where we show the flexibility of the proposed event-based user consent revocation mechanism.This work was partially founded by the Spanish Ministry of Science and Innovation under the project TEC2010-20572-C02-01 (CONSEQUENCE) and by the State of Madrid (Spain) under the contract number S2009/TIC-1650 (e-Madrid). Moreover, the authors would like to thank to the anonymous referees for comments and recommendations for the paper improvement

Sustaining the Promise: Realizing the Potential of Workforce Intermediaries and Sector Projects

Reviews the outcomes of sector-specific workforce development projects run by intermediaries with a comprehensive, long-term approach. Outlines the challenges of and recommendations for securing sustainability in financing, infrastructure, and operations

Improving privacy in identity management systems for health care scenarios

Privacy is a very complex and subjective concept with different meaning to different people. The meaning depends on the context. Moreover, privacy is close to the user information and thus, present in any ubiquitous computing scenario. In the context of identity management (IdM), privacy is gaining more importance since IdM systems deal with services that requires sharing attributes belonging to users’ identity with different entities across domains. Consequently, privacy is a fundamental aspect to be addressed by IdM to protect the exchange of user attributes between services and identity providers across different networks and security domains in pervasive computing. However, problems such as the effective revocation consent, have not been fully addressed. Furthermore, privacy depends heavily on users and applications requiring some degree of flexibility. This paper analyzes the main current identity models, as well as the privacy support presented by the identity management frameworks. After the main limitations are identified, we propose a delegation protocol for the SAML standard in order to enhance the revocation consent within healthcare scenarios.Proyecto CCG10-UC3M/TIC-4992 de la Comunidad Autónoma de Madrid y la Universidad Carlos III de Madri

Federal Employees Health Benefits (FEHB) Program: An Overview

[Excerpt] The Federal Employees Health Benefits (FEHB) Program provides health insurance to federal employees, retirees, and their dependents. This report provides a general overview of FEHB. It describes the structure of FEHB, including eligibility for the program and coverage options available to enrollees, as well as premiums, benefits and cost sharing, and general financing of FEHB. The report also describes the role of the Office of Personnel Management (OPM) in administering the program

The State of the Electronic Identity Market: Technologies, Infrastructure, Services and Policies

Authenticating onto systems, connecting to mobile networks and providing identity data to access services is common ground for most EU citizens, however what is disruptive is that digital technologies fundamentally alter and upset the ways identity is managed, by people, companies and governments. Technological progress in cryptography, identity systems design, smart card design and mobile phone authentication have been developed as a convenient and reliable answer to the need for authentication. Yet, these advances ar enot sufficient to satisfy the needs across people's many spheres of activity: work, leisure, health, social activities nor have they been used to enable cross-border service implementation in the Single Digital Market, or to ensure trust in cross border eCommerce. The study findings assert that the potentially great added value of eID technologies in enabling the Digital Economy has not yet been fulfilled, and fresh efforts are needed to build identification and authentication systems that people can live with, trust and use. The study finds that usability, minimum disclosure and portability, essential features of future systems, are at the margin of the market and cross-country, cross-sector eID systems for business and public service are only in their infancy. This report joins up the dots, and provides significant exploratory evidence of the potential of eID for the Single Digital Market. A clear understanding of this market is crucial for policy action on identification and authentication, eSignature and interoperability.JRC.DDG.J.4-Information Societ

A privacy-preserving design for sharing demand-driven patient datasets over permissioned blockchains and P2P secure transfer

Sharing patient datasets curated by health institutions is critical for the advance of monitoring, surveillance and research. However, patient data is sensitive data and it can only be released under certain conditions and with previous explicit consent. Privacy preserving data sharing provides techniques to distribute datasets minimizing the risk of identification of patients. However, the sharing of datasets is typically done without considering the needs or requests of data consumers. Blockchain technologies provide an opportunity to gather those requests and share and assemble datasets using privacy-preserving methods as data and requirements on anonymity match. The architecture and design of such a solution is described, assuming an underlying permissioned blockchain network where providers such as healthcare institutions deal with consent, patient preferences and anonymity guarantees, playing a mediator role to a network of organizations

Job Security in the Field of Health Information

The industry of Health Information Management (HIM) has remained a hidden career field for several years, affording employment for a plethora of non-traditional job opportunities. Established in 1928, the American Health Information Management Association (AHIMA) has brought some awareness to the field, and over the years has become more aggressive in popularize the field of health information management (AHIMA Workforce, 2005). Over the past eighty-five years the field of HIM has progressed tremendously, branching out into different sectors such as compliance, information technology and insurance; establishing more jobs under the field’s umbrella. Health information management has gained much of its notoriety due to the Health Information Technology for Economics and Clinical Health (HITECH) Act, which has contributed to the abundant growth in the job market, retaining present jobs and supplying new positions. After personally having to make a career change and choosing the field of HIM, what better way to support an accusation then to conduct a non-experimental qualitative research study to prove longevity and job security in the HIM market. Reassuring HIM professionals and prospects that there is more job stability in this field amongst any other