Identity Management and Authorization Infrastructure in Secure Mobile Access to Electronic Health Records

We live in an age of the mobile paradigm of anytime/anywhere access, as the mobile device is the most ubiquitous device that people now hold. Due to their portability, availability, easy of use, communication, access and sharing of information within various domains and areas of our daily lives, the acceptance and adoption of these devices is still growing. However, due to their potential and raising numbers, mobile devices are a growing target for attackers and, like other technologies, mobile applications are still vulnerable. Health information systems are composed with tools and software to collect, manage, analyze and process medical information (such as electronic health records and personal health records). Therefore, such systems can empower the performance and maintenance of health services, promoting availability, readability, accessibility and data sharing of vital information about a patients overall medical history, between geographic fragmented health services. Quick access to information presents a great importance in the health sector, as it accelerates work processes, resulting in better time utilization. Additionally, it may increase the quality of care. However health information systems store and manage highly sensitive data, which raises serious concerns regarding patients privacy and safety, and may explain the still increasing number of malicious incidents reports within the health domain. Data related to health information systems are highly sensitive and subject to severe legal and regulatory restrictions, that aim to protect the individual rights and privacy of patients. Along side with these legislations, security requirements must be analyzed and measures implemented. Within the necessary security requirements to access health data, secure authentication, identity management and access control are essential to provide adequate means to protect data from unauthorized accesses. However, besides the use of simple authentication models, traditional access control models are commonly based on predefined access policies and roles, and are inflexible. This results in uniform access control decisions through people, different type of devices, environments and situational conditions, and across enterprises, location and time. Although already existent models allow to ensure the needs of the health care systems, they still lack components for dynamicity and privacy protection, which leads to not have desire levels of security and to the patient not to have a full and easy control of his privacy. Within this master thesis, after a deep research and review of the stat of art, was published a novel dynamic access control model, Socio-Technical Risk-Adaptable Access Control modEl (SoTRAACE), which can model the inherent differences and security requirements that are present in this thesis. To do this, SoTRAACE aggregates attributes from various domains to help performing a risk assessment at the moment of the request. The assessment of the risk factors identified in this work is based in a Delphi Study. A set of security experts from various domains were selected, to classify the impact in the risk assessment of each attribute that SoTRAACE aggregates. SoTRAACE was integrated in an architecture with requirements well-founded, and based in the best recommendations and standards (OWASP, NIST 800-53, NIST 800-57), as well based in deep review of the state-of-art. The architecture is further targeted with the essential security analysis and the threat model. As proof of concept, the proposed access control model was implemented within the user-centric architecture, with two mobile prototypes for several types of accesses by patients and healthcare professionals, as well the web servers that handles the access requests, authentication and identity management. The proof of concept shows that the model works as expected, with transparency, assuring privacy and data control to the user without impact for user experience and interaction. It is clear that the model can be extended to other industry domains, and new levels of risks or attributes can be added because it is modular. The architecture also works as expected, assuring secure authentication with multifactor, and secure data share/access based in SoTRAACE decisions. The communication channel that SoTRAACE uses was also protected with a digital certificate. At last, the architecture was tested within different Android versions, tested with static and dynamic analysis and with tests with security tools. Future work includes the integration of health data standards and evaluating the proposed system by collecting users’ opinion after releasing the system to real world.Hoje em dia vivemos em um paradigma móvel de acesso em qualquer lugar/hora, sendo que os dispositivos móveis são a tecnologia mais presente no dia a dia da sociedade. Devido à sua portabilidade, disponibilidade, fácil manuseamento, poder de comunicação, acesso e partilha de informação referentes a várias áreas e domínios das nossas vidas, a aceitação e integração destes dispositivos é cada vez maior. No entanto, devido ao seu potencial e aumento do número de utilizadores, os dispositivos móveis são cada vez mais alvos de ataques, e tal como outras tecnologias, aplicações móveis continuam a ser vulneráveis. Sistemas de informação de saúde são compostos por ferramentas e softwares que permitem recolher, administrar, analisar e processar informação médica (tais como documentos de saúde eletrónicos). Portanto, tais sistemas podem potencializar a performance e a manutenção dos serviços de saúde, promovendo assim a disponibilidade, acessibilidade e a partilha de dados vitais referentes ao registro médico geral dos pacientes, entre serviços e instituições que estão geograficamente fragmentadas. O rápido acesso a informações médicas apresenta uma grande importância para o setor da saúde, dado que acelera os processos de trabalho, resultando assim numa melhor eficiência na utilização do tempo e recursos. Consequentemente haverá uma melhor qualidade de tratamento. Porém os sistemas de informação de saúde armazenam e manuseiam dados bastantes sensíveis, o que levanta sérias preocupações referentes à privacidade e segurança do paciente. Assim se explica o aumento de incidentes maliciosos dentro do domínio da saúde. Os dados de saúde são altamente sensíveis e são sujeitos a severas leis e restrições regulamentares, que pretendem assegurar a proteção dos direitos e privacidade dos pacientes, salvaguardando os seus dados de saúde. Juntamente com estas legislações, requerimentos de segurança devem ser analisados e medidas implementadas. Dentro dos requerimentos necessários para aceder aos dados de saúde, uma autenticação segura, gestão de identidade e controlos de acesso são essenciais para fornecer meios adequados para a proteção de dados contra acessos não autorizados. No entanto, além do uso de modelos simples de autenticação, os modelos tradicionais de controlo de acesso são normalmente baseados em políticas de acesso e cargos pré-definidos, e são inflexíveis. Isto resulta em decisões de controlo de acesso uniformes para diferentes pessoas, tipos de dispositivo, ambientes e condições situacionais, empresas, localizações e diferentes alturas no tempo. Apesar dos modelos existentes permitirem assegurar algumas necessidades dos sistemas de saúde, ainda há escassez de componentes para accesso dinâmico e proteção de privacidade , o que resultam em níveis de segurança não satisfatórios e em o paciente não ter controlo directo e total sobre a sua privacidade e documentos de saúde. Dentro desta tese de mestrado, depois da investigação e revisão intensiva do estado da arte, foi publicado um modelo inovador de controlo de acesso, chamado SoTRAACE, que molda as diferenças de acesso inerentes e requerimentos de segurança presentes nesta tese. Para isto, o SoTRAACE agrega atributos de vários ambientes e domínios que ajudam a executar uma avaliação de riscos, no momento em que os dados são requisitados. A avaliação dos fatores de risco identificados neste trabalho são baseados num estudo de Delphi. Um conjunto de peritos de segurança de vários domínios industriais foram selecionados, para classificar o impacto de cada atributo que o SoTRAACE agrega. O SoTRAACE foi integrado numa arquitectura para acesso a dados médicos, com requerimentos bem fundados, baseados nas melhores normas e recomendações (OWASP, NIST 800-53, NIST 800-57), e em revisões intensivas do estado da arte. Esta arquitectura é posteriormente alvo de uma análise de segurança e modelos de ataque. Como prova deste conceito, o modelo de controlo de acesso proposto é implementado juntamente com uma arquitetura focada no utilizador, com dois protótipos para aplicações móveis, que providênciam vários tipos de acesso de pacientes e profissionais de saúde. A arquitetura é constituída também por servidores web que tratam da gestão de dados, controlo de acesso e autenticação e gestão de identidade. O resultado final mostra que o modelo funciona como esperado, com transparência, assegurando a privacidade e o controlo de dados para o utilizador, sem ter impacto na sua interação e experiência. Consequentemente este modelo pode-se extender para outros setores industriais, e novos níveis de risco ou atributos podem ser adicionados a este mesmo, por ser modular. A arquitetura também funciona como esperado, assegurando uma autenticação segura com multi-fator, acesso e partilha de dados segura baseado em decisões do SoTRAACE. O canal de comunicação que o SoTRAACE usa foi também protegido com um certificado digital. A arquitectura foi testada em diferentes versões de Android, e foi alvo de análise estática, dinâmica e testes com ferramentas de segurança. Para trabalho futuro está planeado a integração de normas de dados de saúde e a avaliação do sistema proposto, através da recolha de opiniões de utilizadores no mundo real

Improving privacy in identity management systems for health care scenarios

Privacy is a very complex and subjective concept with different meaning to different people. The meaning depends on the context. Moreover, privacy is close to the user information and thus, present in any ubiquitous computing scenario. In the context of identity management (IdM), privacy is gaining more importance since IdM systems deal with services that requires sharing attributes belonging to users’ identity with different entities across domains. Consequently, privacy is a fundamental aspect to be addressed by IdM to protect the exchange of user attributes between services and identity providers across different networks and security domains in pervasive computing. However, problems such as the effective revocation consent, have not been fully addressed. Furthermore, privacy depends heavily on users and applications requiring some degree of flexibility. This paper analyzes the main current identity models, as well as the privacy support presented by the identity management frameworks. After the main limitations are identified, we propose a delegation protocol for the SAML standard in order to enhance the revocation consent within healthcare scenarios.Proyecto CCG10-UC3M/TIC-4992 de la Comunidad Autónoma de Madrid y la Universidad Carlos III de Madri

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

Contributions to the privacy provisioning for federated identity management platforms

Identity information, personal data and user’s profiles are key assets for organizations and companies by becoming the use of identity management (IdM) infrastructures a prerequisite for most companies, since IdM systems allow them to perform their business transactions by sharing information and customizing services for several purposes in more efficient and effective ways. Due to the importance of the identity management paradigm, a lot of work has been done so far resulting in a set of standards and specifications. According to them, under the umbrella of the IdM paradigm a person’s digital identity can be shared, linked and reused across different domains by allowing users simple session management, etc. In this way, users’ information is widely collected and distributed to offer new added value services and to enhance availability. Whereas these new services have a positive impact on users’ life, they also bring privacy problems. To manage users’ personal data, while protecting their privacy, IdM systems are the ideal target where to deploy privacy solutions, since they handle users’ attribute exchange. Nevertheless, current IdM models and specifications do not sufficiently address comprehensive privacy mechanisms or guidelines, which enable users to better control over the use, divulging and revocation of their online identities. These are essential aspects, specially in sensitive environments where incorrect and unsecured management of user’s data may lead to attacks, privacy breaches, identity misuse or frauds. Nowadays there are several approaches to IdM that have benefits and shortcomings, from the privacy perspective. In this thesis, the main goal is contributing to the privacy provisioning for federated identity management platforms. And for this purpose, we propose a generic architecture that extends current federation IdM systems. We have mainly focused our contributions on health care environments, given their particularly sensitive nature. The two main pillars of the proposed architecture, are the introduction of a selective privacy-enhanced user profile management model and flexibility in revocation consent by incorporating an event-based hybrid IdM approach, which enables to replace time constraints and explicit revocation by activating and deactivating authorization rights according to events. The combination of both models enables to deal with both online and offline scenarios, as well as to empower the user role, by letting her to bring together identity information from different sources. Regarding user’s consent revocation, we propose an implicit revocation consent mechanism based on events, that empowers a new concept, the sleepyhead credentials, which is issued only once and would be used any time. Moreover, we integrate this concept in IdM systems supporting a delegation protocol and we contribute with the definition of mathematical model to determine event arrivals to the IdM system and how they are managed to the corresponding entities, as well as its integration with the most widely deployed specification, i.e., Security Assertion Markup Language (SAML). In regard to user profile management, we define a privacy-awareness user profile management model to provide efficient selective information disclosure. With this contribution a service provider would be able to accesses the specific personal information without being able to inspect any other details and keeping user control of her data by controlling who can access. The structure that we consider for the user profile storage is based on extensions of Merkle trees allowing for hash combining that would minimize the need of individual verification of elements along a path. An algorithm for sorting the tree as we envision frequently accessed attributes to be closer to the root (minimizing the access’ time) is also provided. Formal validation of the above mentioned ideas has been carried out through simulations and the development of prototypes. Besides, dissemination activities were performed in projects, journals and conferences.Programa Oficial de Doctorado en Ingeniería TelemáticaPresidente: María Celeste Campo Vázquez.- Secretario: María Francisca Hinarejos Campos.- Vocal: Óscar Esparza Martí

SMS : a secure healthcare model for smart cities

Technological innovations have enabled the realization of a utopian world where all objects of everydaylife, as well as humans, areinterconnected to form an ?Internet of Things (IoT).? These connected technologies and IoT solutions have led to the emergence of smart cities where all components are converted into a connected smart ecosystem. IoT has envisioned several areas of smart cities including the modern healthcare environment like real-time monitoring, patient information management, ambient-assisted living, ambient-intelligence, anomaly detection, and accelerated sensing. IoT has also brought a breakthrough in the medical domain by integrating stake holders, medical components, and hospitals to bring about holistic healthcare management. The healthcare domain is already witnessing promising IoT-based solutions ranging from embedded mobile applications to wearable devices and implantable gadgets. However, with all these exemplary benefits, there is a need to ensure the safety and privacy of the patient?s personal and medical data communicated to and from the connected devices and systems. For a smart city, it is pertinent to have an accessible, effective, and secure healthcare system for its inhabitants. This paper discusses the various elements of technology-enabled healthcare and presents a privacy-preserved and secure ?Smart Medical System (SMS)? framework for the smart city ecosystem. For providing real-time analysis and responses, this paper proposes to use the concept of secured Mobile Edge Computing (MEC) for performing critical time-bound computations on the edge itself. In order to protect the medical and personal data of the patients and to make the data tamper-proof, the concept of blockchain has been used. Finally, this paper highlights the ways to capture and store the medical big data generated from IoT devices and sensors.5311-8814-F0ED | Sara Maria da Cruz Maia de Oliveira PaivaN/

Implementation of MD5 Framework for Privacy-Preserving Support for Mobile Healthcare

The improvement of science and technology has made life so easy and fast that smartphones and other touch-screen minicomputers have become the most trusted personal storage and communication devices for individuals. Comparable to the rich enhancement in wireless body sensor networks, it is valuable to the development of medical treatment to be exceptionally adaptable and become very flexible by means of smartphones through 2G and 3G system bearers. This has made treatment simple even to the common individual in the general public with less payable cash. In this paper, we introduce privacy-preserving support for mobile healthcare using message digest where we have used an MD5 algorithm instead of AES, which can certainly achieve an efficient way and minimizes the memory consumed and the large amount of PHI data of the medical user (patient) is reduced to a fixed amount of size compared to AES which in parallel increases the speed of the data to be sent to TA without any delay which in-turn. This study implements a secure and privacy-preserving opportunistic computing framework (SPOC) for mobile-health care emergency. Utilizing smartphones and SPOC, assets like computing power and energy can be gathered to reliably to take care of intensive personal health information (PHI) of the medicinal client when he/she is in critical situation with minimal privacy disclosure. With these, the healthcare authorities can treat the patients (restorative clients) remotely, where the patients live at home or at different spots they run. This sort of a treatment can be done under mHealth (Mobile-Healthcare). In malice of the fact that in them-medicinal services administration, there are numerous security and information protection issues to be succeed. The main aim of this paper is to bring medical health to patients in remote locations by providing the basic triage of an emergency to increase the patient’s body acceptance until they can reach a proper medical facility, in addition to providing emergency care in minimal payable cash

A trust-driven privacy architecture for vehicular ad-hoc networks

Vehicular Ad-Hoc NETworks (VANETs) are an emerging technology which aims to improve road safety by preventing and reducing traffic accidents. While VANETs offer a great variety of promising applications, such as, safety-related and infotainment applications, they remain a number of security and privacy related research challenges that must be addressed. A common approach to security issues widely adopted in VANETs is the use of Public Key Infrastructures (PKI) and digital certificates in order to enable authentication, authorization and confidentiality. These approaches usually rely on a large set of regional Certification Authorities (CAs). Despite the advantages of PKI-based approaches, there are two main problems that arise, i) the secure interoperability among the different and usually unknown- issuing CAs, and ii) the sole use of PKI in a VANET environment cannot prevent privacy related attacks, such as, linking a vehicle with an identifier, tracking vehicles ¿big brother scenario" and user profiling. Additionally, since vehicles in VANETs will be able to store great amounts of information including private information, unauthorized access to such information should be carefully considered. This thesis addresses authentication and interoperability issues in vehicular communications, considering an inter-regional scenario where mutual authentication between nodes is needed. To provide interoperability between vehicles and services among different domains, an Inter-domain Authentication System (AS) is proposed. The AS supplies vehicles with a trusted set of authentication credentials by implementing a near real-time certificate status service. The proposed AS also implements a mechanism to quantitatively evaluate the trust level of a CA, in order to decide on-the-y if an interoperability relationship can be created. This research work also contributes with a Privacy Enhancing Model (PEM) to deal with important privacy issues in VANETs. The PEM consists of two PKI-based privacy protocols: i) the Attribute-Based Privacy (ABP) protocol, and ii) the Anonymous Information Retrieval (AIR) protocol. The ABP introduces Attribute-Based Credentials (ABC) to provide conditional anonymity and minimal information disclosure, which overcome with the privacy issues related to linkability (linking a vehicle with an identifier) and vehicle tracking (big brother scenario). The AIR protocol addresses user profiling when querying Service Providers (SPs), by relying in a user collaboration privacy protocol based on query forgery and permutation; and assuming that neither participant nodes nor SPs could be completely trusted. Finally, the Trust Validation Model (TVM) is proposed. The TVM supports decision making by evaluating entities trust based on context information, in order to provide i) access control to driver and vehicle's private information, and ii) public information trust validation