55,724 research outputs found

    Development of grid frameworks for clinical trials and epidemiological studies

    Get PDF
    E-Health initiatives such as electronic clinical trials and epidemiological studies require access to and usage of a range of both clinical and other data sets. Such data sets are typically only available over many heterogeneous domains where a plethora of often legacy based or in-house/bespoke IT solutions exist. Considerable efforts and investments are being made across the UK to upgrade the IT infrastructures across the National Health Service (NHS) such as the National Program for IT in the NHS (NPFIT) [1]. However, it is the case that currently independent and largely non-interoperable IT solutions exist across hospitals, trusts, disease registries and GP practices – this includes security as well as more general compute and data infrastructures. Grid technology allows issues of distribution and heterogeneity to be overcome, however the clinical trials domain places special demands on security and data which hitherto the Grid community have not satisfactorily addressed. These challenges are often common across many studies and trials hence the development of a re-usable framework for creation and subsequent management of such infrastructures is highly desirable. In this paper we present the challenges in developing such a framework and outline initial scenarios and prototypes developed within the MRC funded Virtual Organisations for Trials and Epidemiological Studies (VOTES) project [2]

    E-infrastructures fostering multi-centre collaborative research into the intensive care management of patients with brain injury

    Get PDF
    Clinical research is becoming ever more collaborative with multi-centre trials now a common practice. With this in mind, never has it been more important to have secure access to data and, in so doing, tackle the challenges of inter-organisational data access and usage. This is especially the case for research conducted within the brain injury domain due to the complicated multi-trauma nature of the disease with its associated complex collation of time-series data of varying resolution and quality. It is now widely accepted that advances in treatment within this group of patients will only be delivered if the technical infrastructures underpinning the collection and validation of multi-centre research data for clinical trials is improved. In recognition of this need, IT-based multi-centre e-Infrastructures such as the Brain Monitoring with Information Technology group (BrainIT - www.brainit.org) and Cooperative Study on Brain Injury Depolarisations (COSBID - www.cosbid.de) have been formed. A serious impediment to the effective implementation of these networks is access to the know-how and experience needed to install, deploy and manage security-oriented middleware systems that provide secure access to distributed hospital based datasets and especially the linkage of these data sets across sites. The recently funded EU framework VII ICT project Advanced Arterial Hypotension Adverse Event prediction through a Novel Bayesian Neural Network (AVERT-IT) is focused upon tackling these challenges. This chapter describes the problems inherent to data collection within the brain injury medical domain, the current IT-based solutions designed to address these problems and how they perform in practice. We outline how the authors have collaborated towards developing Grid solutions to address the major technical issues. Towards this end we describe a prototype solution which ultimately formed the basis for the AVERT-IT project. We describe the design of the underlying Grid infrastructure for AVERT-IT and how it will be used to produce novel approaches to data collection, data validation and clinical trial design is also presented

    Security in Pervasive Computing: Current Status and Open Issues

    Get PDF
    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

    Experiences in teaching grid computing to advanced level students

    Get PDF
    The development of teaching materials for future software engineers is critical to the long term success of the grid. At present however there is considerable turmoil in the grid community both within the standards and the technology base underpinning these standards. In this context, it is especially challenging to develop teaching materials that have some sort of lifetime beyond the next wave of grid middleware and standards. In addition, the current way in which grid security is supported and delivered has two key problems. Firstly in the case of the UK e-Science community, scalability issues arise from a central certificate authority. Secondly, the current security mechanisms used by the grid community are not line grained enough. In this paper we outline how these issues are being addressed through the development of a grid computing module supported by an advanced authorisation infrastructure at the University of Glasgow

    A Mediated Definite Delegation Model allowing for Certified Grid Job Submission

    Full text link
    Grid computing infrastructures need to provide traceability and accounting of their users" activity and protection against misuse and privilege escalation. A central aspect of multi-user Grid job environments is the necessary delegation of privileges in the course of a job submission. With respect to these generic requirements this document describes an improved handling of multi-user Grid jobs in the ALICE ("A Large Ion Collider Experiment") Grid Services. A security analysis of the ALICE Grid job model is presented with derived security objectives, followed by a discussion of existing approaches of unrestricted delegation based on X.509 proxy certificates and the Grid middleware gLExec. Unrestricted delegation has severe security consequences and limitations, most importantly allowing for identity theft and forgery of delegated assignments. These limitations are discussed and formulated, both in general and with respect to an adoption in line with multi-user Grid jobs. Based on the architecture of the ALICE Grid Services, a new general model of mediated definite delegation is developed and formulated, allowing a broker to assign context-sensitive user privileges to agents. The model provides strong accountability and long- term traceability. A prototype implementation allowing for certified Grid jobs is presented including a potential interaction with gLExec. The achieved improvements regarding system security, malicious job exploitation, identity protection, and accountability are emphasized, followed by a discussion of non- repudiation in the face of malicious Grid jobs
    • …
    corecore