Formalizing and safeguarding blockchain-based BlockVoke protocol as an ACME extension for fast certificate revocation

Certificates are integral to the security of today’s Internet. Protocols like BlockVoke allow secure, timely and efficient revocation of certificates that need to be invalidated. ACME, a scheme used by the non-profit Let’s Encrypt Certificate Authority to handle most parts of the certificate lifecycle, allows automatic and seamless certificate issuance. In this work, we bring together both protocols by describing and formalizing an extension of the ACME protocol to support BlockVoke, combining the benefits of ACME’s certificate lifecycle management and BlockVoke’s timely and secure revocations. We then formally verify this extension through formal methods such as Colored Petri Nets (CPNs) and conduct a risk and threat analysis of the ACME/BlockVoke extension using the ISSRM domain model. Identified risks and threats are mitigated to secure our novel extension. Furthermore, a proof-of-concept implementation of the ACME/BlockVoke extension is provided, bridging the gap towards deployment in the real world

Thirty years of artificial intelligence in medicine (AIME) conferences: A review of research themes

Over the past 30 years, the international conference on Artificial Intelligence in MEdicine (AIME) has been organized at different venues across Europe every 2 years, establishing a forum for scientific exchange and creating an active research community. The Artificial Intelligence in Medicine journal has published theme issues with extended versions of selected AIME papers since 1998

Extended OCL for Goal Monitoring

Monitoring human-computer interaction aids the analysis for understanding how well software meets its purpose. In particular, monitoring human-computer interactions with respect to a user's goal model helps to determine user satisfaction. By formalizing a goal model, runtime monitors can be automatically derived. The REQMON system monitors the satisfaction of goal models. Recently, an OCL compiler was developed for REQMON. The OCL was extended slightly to address temporal and real-time constraints. Now, goal models can be represented in the extended OCL, from which runtime monitors can be compiled. The resulting REQMON system appears to be easier to use comes the abstract

Querying Social Practices in Hospital Context

Understanding the social contexts in which actions and interactions take place is of utmost importance for planning one’s goals and activities. People use social practices as means to make sense of their environment, assessing how that context relates to past, common experiences, culture and capabilities. Social practices can therefore simplify deliberation and planning in complex contexts. In the context of patient-centered planning, hospitals seek means to ensure that patients and their families are at the center of decisions and planning of the healthcare processes. This requires on one hand that patients are aware of the practices being in place at the hospital and on the other hand that hospitals have the means to evaluate and adapt current practices to the needs of the patients. In this paper we apply a framework for formalizing social practices of an organization to an emergency department that carries out patient-centered planning. We indicate how such a formalization can be used to answer operational queries about the expected outcome of operational actions.</p

Computerization of workflows, guidelines and care pathways: a review of implementation challenges for process-oriented health information systems

There is a need to integrate the various theoretical frameworks and formalisms for modeling clinical guidelines, workflows, and pathways, in order to move beyond providing support for individual clinical decisions and toward the provision of process-oriented, patient-centered, health information systems (HIS). In this review, we analyze the challenges in developing process-oriented HIS that formally model guidelines, workflows, and care pathways. A qualitative meta-synthesis was performed on studies published in English between 1995 and 2010 that addressed the modeling process and reported the exposition of a new methodology, model, system implementation, or system architecture. Thematic analysis, principal component analysis (PCA) and data visualisation techniques were used to identify and cluster the underlying implementation ‘challenge’ themes. One hundred and eight relevant studies were selected for review. Twenty-five underlying ‘challenge’ themes were identified. These were clustered into 10 distinct groups, from which a conceptual model of the implementation process was developed. We found that the development of systems supporting individual clinical decisions is evolving toward the implementation of adaptable care pathways on the semantic web, incorporating formal, clinical, and organizational ontologies, and the use of workflow management systems. These architectures now need to be implemented and evaluated on a wider scale within clinical settings

Towards the Verification of Pervasive Systems

Pervasive systems, that is roughly speaking systems that can interact with their environment, are increasingly common. In such systems, there are many dimensions to assess: security and reliability, safety and liveness, real-time response, etc. So far modelling and formalizing attempts have been very piecemeal approaches. This paper describes our analysis of a pervasive case study (MATCH, a homecare application) and our proposal for formal (particularly verification) approaches. Our goal is to see to what extent current state of the art formal methods are capable of coping with the verification demand introduced by pervasive systems, and to point out their limitations