5,468 research outputs found
Ensuring patients privacy in a cryptographic-based-electronic health records using bio-cryptography
Several recent works have proposed and implemented cryptography as a means to
preserve privacy and security of patients health data. Nevertheless, the
weakest point of electronic health record (EHR) systems that relied on these
cryptographic schemes is key management. Thus, this paper presents the
development of privacy and security system for cryptography-based-EHR by taking
advantage of the uniqueness of fingerprint and iris characteristic features to
secure cryptographic keys in a bio-cryptography framework. The results of the
system evaluation showed significant improvements in terms of time efficiency
of this approach to cryptographic-based-EHR. Both the fuzzy vault and fuzzy
commitment demonstrated false acceptance rate (FAR) of 0%, which reduces the
likelihood of imposters gaining successful access to the keys protecting
patients protected health information. This result also justifies the
feasibility of implementing fuzzy key binding scheme in real applications,
especially fuzzy vault which demonstrated a better performance during key
reconstruction
SoK: Cryptographically Protected Database Search
Protected database search systems cryptographically isolate the roles of
reading from, writing to, and administering the database. This separation
limits unnecessary administrator access and protects data in the case of system
breaches. Since protected search was introduced in 2000, the area has grown
rapidly; systems are offered by academia, start-ups, and established companies.
However, there is no best protected search system or set of techniques.
Design of such systems is a balancing act between security, functionality,
performance, and usability. This challenge is made more difficult by ongoing
database specialization, as some users will want the functionality of SQL,
NoSQL, or NewSQL databases. This database evolution will continue, and the
protected search community should be able to quickly provide functionality
consistent with newly invented databases.
At the same time, the community must accurately and clearly characterize the
tradeoffs between different approaches. To address these challenges, we provide
the following contributions:
1) An identification of the important primitive operations across database
paradigms. We find there are a small number of base operations that can be used
and combined to support a large number of database paradigms.
2) An evaluation of the current state of protected search systems in
implementing these base operations. This evaluation describes the main
approaches and tradeoffs for each base operation. Furthermore, it puts
protected search in the context of unprotected search, identifying key gaps in
functionality.
3) An analysis of attacks against protected search for different base
queries.
4) A roadmap and tools for transforming a protected search system into a
protected database, including an open-source performance evaluation platform
and initial user opinions of protected search.Comment: 20 pages, to appear to IEEE Security and Privac
Enabling Secure Database as a Service using Fully Homomorphic Encryption: Challenges and Opportunities
The database community, at least for the last decade, has been grappling with
querying encrypted data, which would enable secure database as a service
solutions. A recent breakthrough in the cryptographic community (in 2009)
related to fully homomorphic encryption (FHE) showed that arbitrary computation
on encrypted data is possible. Successful adoption of FHE for query processing
is, however, still a distant dream, and numerous challenges have to be
addressed. One challenge is how to perform algebraic query processing of
encrypted data, where we produce encrypted intermediate results and operations
on encrypted data can be composed. In this paper, we describe our solution for
algebraic query processing of encrypted data, and also outline several other
challenges that need to be addressed, while also describing the lessons that
can be learnt from a decade of work by the database community in querying
encrypted data
Why Do Developers Get Password Storage Wrong? A Qualitative Usability Study
Passwords are still a mainstay of various security systems, as well as the
cause of many usability issues. For end-users, many of these issues have been
studied extensively, highlighting problems and informing design decisions for
better policies and motivating research into alternatives. However, end-users
are not the only ones who have usability problems with passwords! Developers
who are tasked with writing the code by which passwords are stored must do so
securely. Yet history has shown that this complex task often fails due to human
error with catastrophic results. While an end-user who selects a bad password
can have dire consequences, the consequences of a developer who forgets to hash
and salt a password database can lead to far larger problems. In this paper we
present a first qualitative usability study with 20 computer science students
to discover how developers deal with password storage and to inform research
into aiding developers in the creation of secure password systems
Some Potential Issues with the Security of HTML5 IndexedDB
The new HTML5 standard provides much more access to client resources, such as user location and local data storage. Unfortunately, this greater access may create new security risks that potentially can yield new threats to user privacy and web attacks. One of these security risks lies with the HTML5 client-side database. It appears that data stored on the client file system is unencrypted. Therefore, any stored data might be at risk of exposure. This paper explains and performs a security investigation into how the data is stored on client local file systems. The investigation was undertaken using Firefox and Chrome web browsers, and Encase (a computer forensic tool), was used to examine the stored data. This paper describes how the data can be retrieved after an application deletes the client side database. Finally, based on our findings, we propose a solution to correct any potential issues and security risks, and recommend ways to store data securely on local file systems
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