Data privacy by design: digital infrastructures for clinical collaborations

The clinical sciences have arguably the most stringent security demands on the adoption and roll-out of collaborative e-Infrastructure solutions such as those based upon Grid-based middleware. Experiences from the Medical Research Council (MRC) funded Virtual Organisations for Trials and Epidemiological Studies (VOTES) project and numerous other real world security driven projects at the UK e-Science National e-Science Centre (NeSC – www.nesc.ac.uk) have shown that whilst advanced Grid security and middleware solutions now offer capabilities to address many of the distributed data and security challenges in the clinical domain, the real clinical world as typified by organizations such as the National Health Service (NHS) in the UK are extremely wary of adoption of such technologies: firewalls; ethics; information governance, software validation, and the actual realities of existing infrastructures need to be considered from the outset. Based on these experiences we present a novel data linkage and anonymisation infrastructure that has been developed with close co-operation of the various stakeholders in the clinical domain (including the NHS) that addresses their concerns and satisfies the needs of the academic clinical research community. We demonstrate the implementation of this infrastructure through a representative clinical study on chronic diseases in Scotland

Architecture for Provenance Systems

This document covers the logical and process architectures of provenance systems. The logical architecture identifies key roles and their interactions, whereas the process architecture discusses distribution and security. A fundamental aspect of our presentation is its technology-independent nature, which makes it reusable: the principles that are exposed in this document may be applied to different technologies

Secure spontaneous emergency access to personal health record

We propose a system which enables access to the user's Personal Health Record (PHR) in the event of emergency. The access typically occurs in an ad-hoc and spontaneous manner and the user is usually unconscious, hence rendering the unavailability of the user's password to access the PHR. The proposed system includes a smart card carried by the user at all time and it is personalized with a pseudo secret, an URL to the PHR Server, a secret key shared with the PHR Server and a number of redemption tokens generated using a hash chain. In each emergency session, a one-time use redemption token is issued by the smart card, allowing the emergency doctor to retrieve the user's PHR upon successful authentication of his credentials and validation of the redemption token. The server returns the PHR encrypted with a one-time session key which can only be decrypted by the emergency doctor. The devised interaction protocol to facilitate emergency access to the user's PHR is secure and efficient

ViotSOC: Controlling Access to Dynamically Virtualized IoT Services using Service Object Capability

Virtualization of Internet of Things(IoT) is a concept of dynamically building customized high-level IoT services which rely on the real time data streams from low-level physical IoT sensors. Security in IoT virtualization is challenging, because with the growing number of available (building block) services, the number of personalizable virtual services grows exponentially. This paper proposes Service Object Capability(SOC) ticket system, a decentralized access control mechanism between servers and clients to effi- ciently authenticate and authorize each other without using public key cryptography. SOC supports decentralized partial delegation of capabilities specified in each server/- client ticket. Unlike PKI certificates, SOC’s authentication time and handshake packet overhead stays constant regardless of each capability’s delegation hop distance from the root delegator. The paper compares SOC’s security bene- fits with Kerberos and the experimental results show SOC’s authentication incurs significantly less time packet overhead compared against those from other mechanisms based on RSA-PKI and ECC-PKI algorithms. SOC is as secure as, and more efficient and suitable for IoT environments, than existing PKIs and Kerberos

Secure k-Nearest Neighbor Query over Encrypted Data in Outsourced Environments

For the past decade, query processing on relational data has been studied extensively, and many theoretical and practical solutions to query processing have been proposed under various scenarios. With the recent popularity of cloud computing, users now have the opportunity to outsource their data as well as the data management tasks to the cloud. However, due to the rise of various privacy issues, sensitive data (e.g., medical records) need to be encrypted before outsourcing to the cloud. In addition, query processing tasks should be handled by the cloud; otherwise, there would be no point to outsource the data at the first place. To process queries over encrypted data without the cloud ever decrypting the data is a very challenging task. In this paper, we focus on solving the k-nearest neighbor (kNN) query problem over encrypted database outsourced to a cloud: a user issues an encrypted query record to the cloud, and the cloud returns the k closest records to the user. We first present a basic scheme and demonstrate that such a naive solution is not secure. To provide better security, we propose a secure kNN protocol that protects the confidentiality of the data, user's input query, and data access patterns. Also, we empirically analyze the efficiency of our protocols through various experiments. These results indicate that our secure protocol is very efficient on the user end, and this lightweight scheme allows a user to use any mobile device to perform the kNN query.Comment: 23 pages, 8 figures, and 4 table

An Effective Private Data storage and Retrieval System using Secret sharing scheme based on Secure Multi-party Computation

Privacy of the outsourced data is one of the major challenge.Insecurity of the network environment and untrustworthiness of the service providers are obstacles of making the database as a service.Collection and storage of personally identifiable information is a major privacy concern.On-line public databases and resources pose a significant risk to user privacy, since a malicious database owner may monitor user queries and infer useful information about the customer.The challenge in data privacy is to share data with third-party and at the same time securing the valuable information from unauthorized access and use by third party.A Private Information Retrieval(PIR) scheme allows a user to query database while hiding the identity of the data retrieved.The naive solution for confidentiality is to encrypt data before outsourcing.Query execution,key management and statistical inference are major challenges in this case.The proposed system suggests a mechanism for secure storage and retrieval of private data using the secret sharing technique.The idea is to develop a mechanism to store private information with a highly available storage provider which could be accessed from anywhere using queries while hiding the actual data values from the storage provider.The private information retrieval system is implemented using Secure Multi-party Computation(SMC) technique which is based on secret sharing. Multi-party Computation enable parties to compute some joint function over their private inputs.The query results are obtained by performing a secure computation on the shares owned by the different servers.Comment: Data Science & Engineering (ICDSE), 2014 International Conference, CUSA