Secure and Trustable Electronic Medical Records Sharing using Blockchain

Electronic medical records (EMRs) are critical, highly sensitive private information in healthcare, and need to be frequently shared among peers. Blockchain provides a shared, immutable and transparent history of all the transactions to build applications with trust, accountability and transparency. This provides a unique opportunity to develop a secure and trustable EMR data management and sharing system using blockchain. In this paper, we present our perspectives on blockchain based healthcare data management, in particular, for EMR data sharing between healthcare providers and for research studies. We propose a framework on managing and sharing EMR data for cancer patient care. In collaboration with Stony Brook University Hospital, we implemented our framework in a prototype that ensures privacy, security, availability, and fine-grained access control over EMR data. The proposed work can significantly reduce the turnaround time for EMR sharing, improve decision making for medical care, and reduce the overall costComment: AMIA 2017 Annual Symposium Proceeding

The Adoption of Blockchain Technologies in Data Sharing: A State of the Art Survey

In the big data era, it is a significant need for data sharing in various industries. However, there are many weaknesses in the traditional centralized way of data sharing. It is easy to attack the centralized data storage center. As the process of data asset transactions is not transparent, there is a lack of trust in the percipients of data sharing. Blockchain technology offers a possibility to solve these problems in data sharing, as the blockchain can provide a decentralized, programmable, tamperproof, and anonymous data sharing environment. In this paper, we compare the blockchain-based data sharing with the traditional ways of data sharing, and analyze the scenarios in major industry applications. We survey the state of the art of the adoption of blockchain technologies in data sharing, and provide a summary about their technical frameworks and schemes

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

A Decentralised Digital Identity Architecture

Current architectures to validate, certify, and manage identity are based on centralised, top-down approaches that rely on trusted authorities and third-party operators. We approach the problem of digital identity starting from a human rights perspective, with a primary focus on identity systems in the developed world. We assert that individual persons must be allowed to manage their personal information in a multitude of different ways in different contexts and that to do so, each individual must be able to create multiple unrelated identities. Therefore, we first define a set of fundamental constraints that digital identity systems must satisfy to preserve and promote privacy as required for individual autonomy. With these constraints in mind, we then propose a decentralised, standards-based approach, using a combination of distributed ledger technology and thoughtful regulation, to facilitate many-to-many relationships among providers of key services. Our proposal for digital identity differs from others in its approach to trust in that we do not seek to bind credentials to each other or to a mutually trusted authority to achieve strong non-transferability. Because the system does not implicitly encourage its users to maintain a single aggregated identity that can potentially be constrained or reconstructed against their interests, individuals and organisations are free to embrace the system and share in its benefits.Comment: 30 pages, 10 figures, 3 table

Analysis and improvement of security and privacy techniques for genomic information

The purpose of this thesis is to review the current literature of privacy preserving techniques for genomic information on the last years. Based on the analysis, we propose a long-term classification system for the reviewed techniques. We also develop a security improvement proposal for the Beacon system without hindering research utility