Towards A Well-Secured Electronic Health Record in the Health Cloud

The major concerns for most cloud implementers particularly in the health care industry have remained data security and privacy. A prominent and major threat that constitutes a hurdle for practitioners within the health industry from exploiting and benefiting from the gains of cloud computing is the fear of theft of patients health data in the cloud. Investigations and surveys have revealed that most practitioners in the health care industry are concerned about the risk of health data mix-up amongst the various cloud providers, hacking to comprise the cloud platform and theft of vital patients’ health data.An overview of the diverse issues relating to health data privacy and overall security in the cloud are presented in this technical report. Based on identifed secure access requirements, an encryption-based eHR security model for securing and enforcing authorised access to electronic health data (records), eHR is also presented. It highlights three core functionalities for managing issues relating to health data privacy and security of eHR in health care cloud

Security in Pervasive Computing: Current Status and Open Issues

Million of wireless device users are ever on the move, becoming more dependent on their PDAs, smart phones, and other handheld devices. With the advancement of pervasive computing, new and unique capabilities are available to aid mobile societies. The wireless nature of these devices has fostered a new era of mobility. Thousands of pervasive devices are able to arbitrarily join and leave a network, creating a nomadic environment known as a pervasive ad hoc network. However, mobile devices have vulnerabilities, and some are proving to be challenging. Security in pervasive computing is the most critical challenge. Security is needed to ensure exact and accurate confidentiality, integrity, authentication, and access control, to name a few. Security for mobile devices, though still in its infancy, has drawn the attention of various researchers. As pervasive devices become incorporated in our day-to-day lives, security will increasingly becoming a common concern for all users - - though for most it will be an afterthought, like many other computing functions. The usability and expansion of pervasive computing applications depends greatly on the security and reliability provided by the applications. At this critical juncture, security research is growing. This paper examines the recent trends and forward thinking investigation in several fields of security, along with a brief history of previous accomplishments in the corresponding areas. Some open issues have been discussed for further investigation

Enforcing policies with privacy guardians

AbstractReasoning about privacy in electronic environments populated with privacy-concerned agents that exchange personal data requires control of ownership and proving the right of possession of a piece of data. The privacy policy expressed by an individual for his personal data can be enforced by a context-aware mobile agent, called alter-ego, accompanying the personal data disclosed.We discuss the first steps towards a formal framework for expressing policies on information disclosure and their integration in the behavior specification of the alter-egos, that enables characterization of an environment manipulating personal data from the privacy perspective

Online advertising: analysis of privacy threats and protection approaches

Online advertising, the pillar of the “free” content on the Web, has revolutionized the marketing business in recent years by creating a myriad of new opportunities for advertisers to reach potential customers. The current advertising model builds upon an intricate infrastructure composed of a variety of intermediary entities and technologies whose main aim is to deliver personalized ads. For this purpose, a wealth of user data is collected, aggregated, processed and traded behind the scenes at an unprecedented rate. Despite the enormous value of online advertising, however, the intrusiveness and ubiquity of these practices prompt serious privacy concerns. This article surveys the online advertising infrastructure and its supporting technologies, and presents a thorough overview of the underlying privacy risks and the solutions that may mitigate them. We first analyze the threats and potential privacy attackers in this scenario of online advertising. In particular, we examine the main components of the advertising infrastructure in terms of tracking capabilities, data collection, aggregation level and privacy risk, and overview the tracking and data-sharing technologies employed by these components. Then, we conduct a comprehensive survey of the most relevant privacy mechanisms, and classify and compare them on the basis of their privacy guarantees and impact on the Web.Peer ReviewedPostprint (author's final draft

Using Event Calculus to Formalise Policy Specification and Analysis

As the interest in using policy-based approaches for systems management grows, it is becoming increasingly important to develop methods for performing analysis and refinement of policy specifications. Although this is an area that researchers have devoted some attention to, none of the proposed solutions address the issues of analysing specifications that combine authorisation and management policies; analysing policy specifications that contain constraints on the applicability of the policies; and performing a priori analysis of the specification that will both detect the presence of inconsistencies and explain the situations in which the conflict will occur. We present a method for transforming both policy and system behaviour specifications into a formal notation that is based on event calculus. Additionally it describes how this formalism can be used in conjunction with abductive reasoning techniques to perform a priori analysis of policy specifications for the various conflict types identified in the literature. Finally, it presents some initial thoughts on how this notation and analysis technique could be used to perform policy refinement

Privacy, security, and trust issues in smart environments

Recent advances in networking, handheld computing and sensor technologies have driven forward research towards the realisation of Mark Weiser's dream of calm and ubiquitous computing (variously called pervasive computing, ambient computing, active spaces, the disappearing computer or context-aware computing). In turn, this has led to the emergence of smart environments as one significant facet of research in this domain. A smart environment, or space, is a region of the real world that is extensively equipped with sensors, actuators and computing components [1]. In effect the smart space becomes a part of a larger information system: with all actions within the space potentially affecting the underlying computer applications, which may themselves affect the space through the actuators. Such smart environments have tremendous potential within many application areas to improve the utility of a space. Consider the potential offered by a smart environment that prolongs the time an elderly or infirm person can live an independent life or the potential offered by a smart environment that supports vicarious learning

Enforcement in Dynamic Spectrum Access Systems

The spectrum access rights granted by the Federal government to spectrum users come with the expectation of protection from harmful interference. As a consequence of the growth of wireless demand and services of all types, technical progress enabling smart agile radio networks, and on-going spectrum management reform, there is both a need and opportunity to use and share spectrum more intensively and dynamically. A key element of any framework for managing harmful interference is the mechanism for enforcement of those rights. Since the rights to use spectrum and to protection from harmful interference vary by band (licensed/unlicensed, legacy/newly reformed) and type of use/users (primary/secondary, overlay/underlay), it is reasonable to expect that the enforcement mechanisms may need to vary as well.\ud \ud In this paper, we present a taxonomy for evaluating alternative mechanisms for enforcing interference protection for spectrum usage rights, with special attention to the potential changes that may be expected from wider deployment of Dynamic Spectrum Access (DSA) systems. Our exploration of how the design of the enforcement regime interacts with and influences the incentives of radio operators under different rights regimes and market scenarios is intended to assist in refining thinking about appropriate access rights regimes and how best to incentivize investment and growth in more efficient and valuable uses of the radio frequency spectrum

On the Security of Software Systems and Services

This work investigates new methods for facing the security issues and threats arising from the composition of software. This task has been carried out through the formal modelling of both the software composition scenarios and the security properties, i.e., policies, to be guaranteed. Our research moves across three different modalities of software composition which are of main interest for some of the most sensitive aspects of the modern information society. They are mobile applications, trust-based composition and service orchestration. Mobile applications are programs designed for being deployable on remote platforms. Basically, they are the main channel for the distribution and commercialisation of software for mobile devices, e.g., smart phones and tablets. Here we study the security threats that affect the application providers and the hosting platforms. In particular, we present a programming framework for the development of applications with a static and dynamic security support. Also, we implemented an enforcement mechanism for applying fine-grained security controls on the execution of possibly malicious applications. In addition to security, trust represents a pragmatic and intuitive way for managing the interactions among systems. Currently, trust is one of the main factors that human beings keep into account when deciding whether to accept a transaction or not. In our work we investigate the possibility of defining a fully integrated environment for security policies and trust including a runtime monitor. Finally, Service-Oriented Computing (SOC) is the leading technology for business applications distributed over a network. The security issues related to the service networks are many and multi-faceted. We mainly deal with the static verification of secure composition plans of web services. Moreover, we introduce the synthesis of dynamic security checks for protecting the services against illegal invocations