Privacy-preserving data sharing infrastructures for medical research: systematization and comparison

Background: Data sharing is considered a crucial part of modern medical research. Unfortunately, despite its advantages, it often faces obstacles, especially data privacy challenges. As a result, various approaches and infrastructures have been developed that aim to ensure that patients and research participants remain anonymous when data is shared. However, privacy protection typically comes at a cost, e.g. restrictions regarding the types of analyses that can be performed on shared data. What is lacking is a systematization making the trade-offs taken by different approaches transparent. The aim of the work described in this paper was to develop a systematization for the degree of privacy protection provided and the trade-offs taken by different data sharing methods. Based on this contribution, we categorized popular data sharing approaches and identified research gaps by analyzing combinations of promising properties and features that are not yet supported by existing approaches. Methods: The systematization consists of different axes. Three axes relate to privacy protection aspects and were adopted from the popular Five Safes Framework: (1) safe data, addressing privacy at the input level, (2) safe settings, addressing privacy during shared processing, and (3) safe outputs, addressing privacy protection of analysis results. Three additional axes address the usefulness of approaches: (4) support for de-duplication, to enable the reconciliation of data belonging to the same individuals, (5) flexibility, to be able to adapt to different data analysis requirements, and (6) scalability, to maintain performance with increasing complexity of shared data or common analysis processes. Results: Using the systematization, we identified three different categories of approaches: distributed data analyses, which exchange anonymous aggregated data, secure multi-party computation protocols, which exchange encrypted data, and data enclaves, which store pooled individual-level data in secure environments for access for analysis purposes. We identified important research gaps, including a lack of approaches enabling the de-duplication of horizontally distributed data or providing a high degree of flexibility. Conclusions: There are fundamental differences between different data sharing approaches and several gaps in their functionality that may be interesting to investigate in future work. Our systematization can make the properties of privacy-preserving data sharing infrastructures more transparent and support decision makers and regulatory authorities with a better understanding of the trade-offs taken

Systematizing Genome Privacy Research: A Privacy-Enhancing Technologies Perspective

Rapid advances in human genomics are enabling researchers to gain a better understanding of the role of the genome in our health and well-being, stimulating hope for more effective and cost efficient healthcare. However, this also prompts a number of security and privacy concerns stemming from the distinctive characteristics of genomic data. To address them, a new research community has emerged and produced a large number of publications and initiatives. In this paper, we rely on a structured methodology to contextualize and provide a critical analysis of the current knowledge on privacy-enhancing technologies used for testing, storing, and sharing genomic data, using a representative sample of the work published in the past decade. We identify and discuss limitations, technical challenges, and issues faced by the community, focusing in particular on those that are inherently tied to the nature of the problem and are harder for the community alone to address. Finally, we report on the importance and difficulty of the identified challenges based on an online survey of genome data privacy expertsComment: To appear in the Proceedings on Privacy Enhancing Technologies (PoPETs), Vol. 2019, Issue

Redescribing Health Privacy: The Importance of Health Policy

Current conversations about health information policy often tend to be based on three broad assumptions. First, many perceive a tension between regulation and innovation. We often hear that privacy regulations are keeping researchers, companies, and providers from aggregating the data they need to promote innovation. Second, aggregation of fragmented data is seen as a threat to its proper regulation, creating the risk of breaches and other misuse. Third, a prime directive for technicians and policymakers is to give patients ever more granular methods of control over data. This article questions and complicates those assumptions, which I deem (respectively) the Privacy Threat to Research, the Aggregation Threat to Privacy, and the Control Solution. This article is also intended to enrich our concepts of “fragmentation” and “integration” in health care. There is a good deal of sloganeering around “firewalls” and “vertical integration” as idealized implementations of “fragmentation” and “integration” (respective). The problem, though, is that terms like these (as well as “disruption”) are insufficiently normative to guide large-scale health system change. They describe, but they do not adequately prescribe. By examining those instances where: a) regulation promotes innovation, and b) increasing (some kinds of) availability of data actually enhances security, confidentiality, and privacy protections, this article attempts to give a richer account of the ethics of fragmentation and integration in the U.S. health care system. But, it also has a darker side, highlighting the inevitable conflicts of values created in a “reputation society” driven by stigmatizing social sorting systems. Personal data control may exacerbate social inequalities. Data aggregation may increase both our powers of research and our vulnerability to breach. The health data policymaking landscape of the next decade will feature a series of intractable conflicts between these important social values

Zero-touch realization of Pervasive Artificial Intelligence-as-a-service in 6G networks

The vision of the upcoming 6G technologies, characterized by ultra-dense network, low latency, and fast data rate is to support Pervasive AI (PAI) using zero-touch solutions enabling self-X (e.g., self-configuration, self-monitoring, and self-healing) services. However, the research on 6G is still in its infancy, and only the first steps have been taken to conceptualize its design, investigate its implementation, and plan for use cases. Toward this end, academia and industry communities have gradually shifted from theoretical studies of AI distribution to real-world deployment and standardization. Still, designing an end-to-end framework that systematizes the AI distribution by allowing easier access to the service using a third-party application assisted by a zero-touch service provisioning has not been well explored. In this context, we introduce a novel platform architecture to deploy a zero-touch PAI-as-a-Service (PAIaaS) in 6G networks supported by a blockchain-based smart system. This platform aims to standardize the pervasive AI at all levels of the architecture and unify the interfaces in order to facilitate the service deployment across application and infrastructure domains, relieve the users worries about cost, security, and resource allocation, and at the same time, respect the 6G stringent performance requirements. As a proof of concept, we present a Federated Learning-as-a-service use case where we evaluate the ability of our proposed system to self-optimize and self-adapt to the dynamics of 6G networks in addition to minimizing the users' perceived costs.Comment: IEEE Communications Magazin

Analysis and improvement of security and privacy techniques for genomic information

The purpose of this thesis is to review the current literature of privacy preserving techniques for genomic information on the last years. Based on the analysis, we propose a long-term classification system for the reviewed techniques. We also develop a security improvement proposal for the Beacon system without hindering research utility

Applying Formal Methods to Networking: Theory, Techniques and Applications

Despite its great importance, modern network infrastructure is remarkable for the lack of rigor in its engineering. The Internet which began as a research experiment was never designed to handle the users and applications it hosts today. The lack of formalization of the Internet architecture meant limited abstractions and modularity, especially for the control and management planes, thus requiring for every new need a new protocol built from scratch. This led to an unwieldy ossified Internet architecture resistant to any attempts at formal verification, and an Internet culture where expediency and pragmatism are favored over formal correctness. Fortunately, recent work in the space of clean slate Internet design---especially, the software defined networking (SDN) paradigm---offers the Internet community another chance to develop the right kind of architecture and abstractions. This has also led to a great resurgence in interest of applying formal methods to specification, verification, and synthesis of networking protocols and applications. In this paper, we present a self-contained tutorial of the formidable amount of work that has been done in formal methods, and present a survey of its applications to networking.Comment: 30 pages, submitted to IEEE Communications Surveys and Tutorial

Analyzing the Impacts of Emerging Technologies on Workforce Skills: A Case Study of Industrial Engineering in the Context of the Industrial Internet of Things

New technologies can result in major disruptions and change paradigms that were once well established. Methods have been developed to forecast new technologies and to analyze the impacts of them in terms of processes, products, and services. However, the current literature does not provide answers on how to forecast changes in terms of skills and knowledge, given an emerging technology. This thesis aims to fill this literature gap by developing a structured method to forecast the required set of skills for emerging technologies and to compare it with the current skills of the workforce. The method relies on the breakdown of the emerging technology into smaller components, so then skills can be identified for each component. A case study was conducted to implement and test the proposed method. In this case study, the impacts of the Industrial Internet of Things (IIoT) on engineering skills and knowledge were assessed. Text data analytics validated IIoT as an emerging technology, thus justifying the case study based on engineering and manufacturing discussions. The set of skills required for IIoT was compared to the current skills developed by Industrial Engineering students at the University of Windsor. Text data analytics was also used to evaluate the importance of each IIoT component by measuring how associated individual components are to IIoT. Therefore, existing skill gaps between the current Industrial Engineering program and IIoT requirements were not only mapped, but they were also given weights

Towards Improved Homomorphic Encryption for Privacy-Preserving Deep Learning

Mención Internacional en el título de doctorDeep Learning (DL) has supposed a remarkable transformation for many fields, heralded by some as a new technological revolution. The advent of large scale models has increased the demands for data and computing platforms, for which cloud computing has become the go-to solution. However, the permeability of DL and cloud computing are reduced in privacy-enforcing areas that deal with sensitive data. These areas imperatively call for privacy-enhancing technologies that enable responsible, ethical, and privacy-compliant use of data in potentially hostile environments. To this end, the cryptography community has addressed these concerns with what is known as Privacy-Preserving Computation Techniques (PPCTs), a set of tools that enable privacy-enhancing protocols where cleartext access to information is no longer tenable. Of these techniques, Homomorphic Encryption (HE) stands out for its ability to perform operations over encrypted data without compromising data confidentiality or privacy. However, despite its promise, HE is still a relatively nascent solution with efficiency and usability limitations. Improving the efficiency of HE has been a longstanding challenge in the field of cryptography, and with improvements, the complexity of the techniques has increased, especially for non-experts. In this thesis, we address the problem of the complexity of HE when applied to DL. We begin by systematizing existing knowledge in the field through an in-depth analysis of state-of-the-art for privacy-preserving deep learning, identifying key trends, research gaps, and issues associated with current approaches. One such identified gap lies in the necessity for using vectorized algorithms with Packed Homomorphic Encryption (PaHE), a state-of-the-art technique to reduce the overhead of HE in complex areas. This thesis comprehensively analyzes existing algorithms and proposes new ones for using DL with PaHE, presenting a formal analysis and usage guidelines for their implementation. Parameter selection of HE schemes is another recurring challenge in the literature, given that it plays a critical role in determining not only the security of the instantiation but also the precision, performance, and degree of security of the scheme. To address this challenge, this thesis proposes a novel system combining fuzzy logic with linear programming tasks to produce secure parametrizations based on high-level user input arguments without requiring low-level knowledge of the underlying primitives. Finally, this thesis describes HEFactory, a symbolic execution compiler designed to streamline the process of producing HE code and integrating it with Python. HEFactory implements the previous proposals presented in this thesis in an easy-to-use tool. It provides a unique architecture that layers the challenges associated with HE and produces simplified operations interpretable by low-level HE libraries. HEFactory significantly reduces the overall complexity to code DL applications using HE, resulting in an 80% length reduction from expert-written code while maintaining equivalent accuracy and efficiency.El aprendizaje profundo ha supuesto una notable transformación para muchos campos que algunos han calificado como una nueva revolución tecnológica. La aparición de modelos masivos ha aumentado la demanda de datos y plataformas informáticas, para lo cual, la computación en la nube se ha convertido en la solución a la que recurrir. Sin embargo, la permeabilidad del aprendizaje profundo y la computación en la nube se reduce en los ámbitos de la privacidad que manejan con datos sensibles. Estas áreas exigen imperativamente el uso de tecnologías de mejora de la privacidad que permitan un uso responsable, ético y respetuoso con la privacidad de los datos en entornos potencialmente hostiles. Con este fin, la comunidad criptográfica ha abordado estas preocupaciones con las denominadas técnicas de la preservación de la privacidad en el cómputo, un conjunto de herramientas que permiten protocolos de mejora de la privacidad donde el acceso a la información en texto claro ya no es sostenible. Entre estas técnicas, el cifrado homomórfico destaca por su capacidad para realizar operaciones sobre datos cifrados sin comprometer la confidencialidad o privacidad de la información. Sin embargo, a pesar de lo prometedor de esta técnica, sigue siendo una solución relativamente incipiente con limitaciones de eficiencia y usabilidad. La mejora de la eficiencia del cifrado homomórfico en la criptografía ha sido todo un reto, y, con las mejoras, la complejidad de las técnicas ha aumentado, especialmente para los usuarios no expertos. En esta tesis, abordamos el problema de la complejidad del cifrado homomórfico cuando se aplica al aprendizaje profundo. Comenzamos sistematizando el conocimiento existente en el campo a través de un análisis exhaustivo del estado del arte para el aprendizaje profundo que preserva la privacidad, identificando las tendencias clave, las lagunas de investigación y los problemas asociados con los enfoques actuales. Una de las lagunas identificadas radica en el uso de algoritmos vectorizados con cifrado homomórfico empaquetado, que es una técnica del estado del arte que reduce el coste del cifrado homomórfico en áreas complejas. Esta tesis analiza exhaustivamente los algoritmos existentes y propone nuevos algoritmos para el uso de aprendizaje profundo utilizando cifrado homomórfico empaquetado, presentando un análisis formal y unas pautas de uso para su implementación. La selección de parámetros de los esquemas del cifrado homomórfico es otro reto recurrente en la literatura, dado que juega un papel crítico a la hora de determinar no sólo la seguridad de la instanciación, sino también la precisión, el rendimiento y el grado de seguridad del esquema. Para abordar este reto, esta tesis propone un sistema innovador que combina la lógica difusa con tareas de programación lineal para producir parametrizaciones seguras basadas en argumentos de entrada de alto nivel sin requerir conocimientos de bajo nivel de las primitivas subyacentes. Por último, esta tesis propone HEFactory, un compilador de ejecución simbólica diseñado para agilizar el proceso de producción de código de cifrado homomórfico e integrarlo con Python. HEFactory es la culminación de las propuestas presentadas en esta tesis, proporcionando una arquitectura única que estratifica los retos asociados con el cifrado homomórfico, produciendo operaciones simplificadas que pueden ser interpretadas por bibliotecas de bajo nivel. Este enfoque permite a HEFactory reducir significativamente la longitud total del código, lo que supone una reducción del 80% en la complejidad de programación de aplicaciones de aprendizaje profundo que usan cifrado homomórfico en comparación con el código escrito por expertos, manteniendo una precisión equivalente.Programa de Doctorado en Ciencia y Tecnología Informática por la Universidad Carlos III de MadridPresidenta: María Isabel González Vasco.- Secretario: David Arroyo Guardeño.- Vocal: Antonis Michala

Decentralisation: a multidisciplinary perspective

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