Security Engineering of Patient-Centered Health Care Information Systems in Peer-to-Peer Environments: Systematic Review

Background: Patient-centered health care information systems (PHSs) enable patients to take control and become knowledgeable about their own health, preferably in a secure environment. Current and emerging PHSs use either a centralized database, peer-to-peer (P2P) technology, or distributed ledger technology for PHS deployment. The evolving COVID-19 decentralized Bluetooth-based tracing systems are examples of disease-centric P2P PHSs. Although using P2P technology for the provision of PHSs can be flexible, scalable, resilient to a single point of failure, and inexpensive for patients, the use of health information on P2P networks poses major security issues as users must manage information security largely by themselves. Objective: This study aims to identify the inherent security issues for PHS deployment in P2P networks and how they can be overcome. In addition, this study reviews different P2P architectures and proposes a suitable architecture for P2P PHS deployment. Methods: A systematic literature review was conducted following PRISMA (Preferred Reporting Items for Systematic Reviews and Meta-Analyses) reporting guidelines. Thematic analysis was used for data analysis. We searched the following databases: IEEE Digital Library, PubMed, Science Direct, ACM Digital Library, Scopus, and Semantic Scholar. The search was conducted on articles published between 2008 and 2020. The Common Vulnerability Scoring System was used as a guide for rating security issues. Results: Our findings are consolidated into 8 key security issues associated with PHS implementation and deployment on P2P networks and 7 factors promoting them. Moreover, we propose a suitable architecture for P2P PHSs and guidelines for the provision of PHSs while maintaining information security. Conclusions: Despite the clear advantages of P2P PHSs, the absence of centralized controls and inconsistent views of the network on some P2P systems have profound adverse impacts in terms of security. The security issues identified in this study need to be addressed to increase patients\u27 intention to use PHSs on P2P networks by making them safe to use

Currency management system: a distributed banking service for the grid

Market based resource allocation mechanisms require mechanisms to regulate and manage the usage of traded resources. One mechanism to control this is the definition of some kind of currency. Within this context, we have implemented a first prototype of our Currency Management System, which stands for a decentralized and scalable banking service for the Grid. Basically, our system stores user accounts within a DHT and its basic operation is the transferFunds which, as its name suggests, transfers virtual currency from an account to one another

Evaluating a peer-to-peer storage system in presence of malicious peers

International audienceWe present a peer-to-peer based storage system and evaluate its resistance in the presence of malicious peers. To do so, we resort to simulation of the actual code borrowed from the production system. Our analysis allows to identify the main threats, prioritise them and propose directions for mitigating the attacks

Low-latency mix networks for anonymous communication

Every modern online application relies on the network layer to transfer information, which exposes the metadata associated with digital communication. These distinctive characteristics encapsulate equally meaningful information as the content of the communication itself and allow eavesdroppers to uniquely identify users and their activities. Hence, by exposing the IP addresses and by analyzing patterns of the network traffic, a malicious entity can deanonymize most online communications. While content confidentiality has made significant progress over the years, existing solutions for anonymous communication which protect the network metadata still have severe limitations, including centralization, limited security, poor scalability, and high-latency. As the importance of online privacy increases, the need to build low-latency communication systems with strong security guarantees becomes necessary. Therefore, in this thesis, we address the problem of building multi-purpose anonymous networks that protect communication privacy. To this end, we design a novel mix network Loopix, which guarantees communication unlinkability and supports applications with various latency and bandwidth constraints. Loopix offers better security properties than any existing solution for anonymous communications while at the same time being scalable and low-latency. Furthermore, we also explore the problem of active attacks and malicious infrastructure nodes, and propose a Miranda mechanism which allows to efficiently mitigate them. In the second part of this thesis, we show that mix networks may be used as a building block in the design of a private notification system, which enables fast and low-cost online notifications. Moreover, its privacy properties benefit from an increasing number of users, meaning that the system can scale to millions of clients at a lower cost than any alternative solution

TrustedKad - Application of Trust Mechanisms to a Kademlia-Based Peer-to-Peer Network

Peer-to-Peer-Netzwerke (P2P) sind verteilte Systeme, die aus gleichberechtigten Knoten („Peers“) bestehen. Im Gegensatz zu klassischen Client-Server-Systemen gibt es in P2P-Netzwerken keine hierarchischen Ebenen oder zentrale Kontrolleinheiten: Alle Peers bieten gleichzeitig Dienste an und nutzen sie. Im vergangenen Jahrzehnt ist eine Vielzahl verschiedener P2P-Anwendungen entwickelt worden – Filesharing-Anwendungen wie BitTorrent und eMule und Kommunikations-Anwendungen wie Skype gehören zu den bekanntesten von ihnen. Forschungsarbeiten haben gezeigt, dass P2P-Netzwerke anfällig für verschiedene Arten von Angriffen sind. Bekannte Angriffe sind z.B. die Sybil- und die Eclipse-Attack. Die üblichen Gegenmaßnahmen gegen die Angriffe sind Replikation und das Verwenden von disjunkten Routing-Pfaden, um die Wahrscheinlichkeit zu reduzieren, während einer Routing- oder Storage-Operation mit bösartigen Knoten zu interagieren. Seit einiger Zeit wird die Anwendung von Vertrauensmechanismen auf P2P-Netzwerke untersucht. Existierende Arbeiten betrachten meist unstrukturierte P2P-Netzwerke – in realen Umgebungen überwiegen jedoch die strukturierten Netzwerke. Insbesondere Implementierungen des Kademlia-Algorithmus‘ sind weit verbreitet, da er von BitTorrent und eMule genutzt wird. Dennoch versucht keiner der vertrauensbasierten Ansätze, die strukturierte Netzwerke behandeln, speziell die Sicherheit von Kademlia zu verbessern. Aufgrund der Verbreitung von Kademlia wird TrustedKad vom Autor entwickelt, um die Sicherheit des Kademlia-Algorithmus‘ zu verbessern. In dieser Arbeit wird TrustedKad eingeführt und die Funktionsweise erläutert. TrustedKad bewertet das Verhalten von Knoten nach Routing- oder Storage-Operationen als entweder positiv oder negativ. Dafür definiert TrustedKad unter Berücksichtigung der Funktionsweise von Kademlia die Regeln, nach denen gut- und bösartiges Verhalten identifiziert wird. Basierend auf diesen Bewertungen werden Vertrauenswerte für Routing und Storage berechnet, um gutartige und bösartige Knoten zu erkennen. Jeder Knoten nutzt Schwellwerte für diese Vertrauenswerte, um zu entscheiden, welche Knoten er als vertrauenswürdig ansieht. Nicht vertrauenswürdige Knoten werden während der eigenen Operationen eines Knotens vermieden. Darüber hinaus nutzt TrustedKad zusätzliche Sicherheitsfunktionen, um die Sicherheit des Systems weiter zu erhöhen. Diese werden im Verlauf dieser Arbeit vorgestellt. Um TrustedKad zu evaluieren, wird es in einer Simulationsumgebung implementiert und analysiert. Die in dieser Arbeit präsentierten Ergebnisse zeigen, dass TrustedKad in der Lage ist, gutartige und bösartige Knoten zu unterscheiden. Es wehrt verschiedene Variationen von bekannten Angriffen ab und verbessert die Sicherheit von Kademlia-basierten Netzwerken deutlich.Peer-to-peer networks (P2P) are distributed systems that consist of equal nodes (“peers”). In contrast to classic client/server systems, there is no hierarchy or central entity: All peers offer services and use them at the same time. In the past decade, a multitude of different P2P applications has been developed – filesharing applications such as BitTorrent and eMule and communication applications such as Skype are among the most popular of them. Research has shown that P2P networks are vulnerable to different kinds of attacks. Known attacks include, e.g., the Sybil attack and the Eclipse attack. Traditional countermeasures against the attacks are replication and the usage of disjoint routing paths to reduce the probability of interacting with malicious nodes during a routing or storage operation. More recently, trust mechanisms have been proposed and analyzed for applicability to P2P networks. The existing related work mostly targets unstructured P2P networks – however, in real-world environments, the structured networks prevail. Especially implementations of the Kademlia algorithm are widely spread, as it is used by BitTorrent and eMule. Nevertheless, none of the trust-based approaches that aim at structured networks specifically attempts to enhance Kademlia’s security. Due to Kademlia’s prevalence, TrustedKad is particularly designed by the author to improve the security of the Kademlia algorithm. In this thesis, TrustedKad is introduced and its functioning is explained. TrustedKad rates the behavior of nodes after routing and storage operations as either positive or negative. To do so, it defines the rules by which inoffensive and malicious behavior is identified in dependence of the functioning of the Kademlia algorithm. Based on the ratings, routing and storage trust values are calculated to identify inoffensive and malicious nodes. Every node uses thresholds for these trust values to decide which nodes it regards as trustworthy. Non-trustworthy nodes are avoided during a node’s own operations. Furthermore, TrustedKad uses additional security features to further increase the security of the system. They are introduced in this thesis. In order to evaluate TrustedKad, it is implemented and analyzed in a simulation environment. The results presented in this thesis show that TrustedKad is able to distinguish inoffensive and malicious nodes. It counters miscellaneous variations of known attacks and improves the security of Kademlia-based networks considerably

CHORUS Deliverable 2.1: State of the Art on Multimedia Search Engines

Based on the information provided by European projects and national initiatives related to multimedia search as well as domains experts that participated in the CHORUS Think-thanks and workshops, this document reports on the state of the art related to multimedia content search from, a technical, and socio-economic perspective. The technical perspective includes an up to date view on content based indexing and retrieval technologies, multimedia search in the context of mobile devices and peer-to-peer networks, and an overview of current evaluation and benchmark inititiatives to measure the performance of multimedia search engines. From a socio-economic perspective we inventorize the impact and legal consequences of these technical advances and point out future directions of research

An ant-inspired, deniable routing approach in ad hoc question & answer networks

The ubiquity of the Internet facilitates electronic question and answering (Q&A) between real people with ease via community portals and social networking websites. It is a useful service which allows users to appeal to a broad range of answerers. In most cases however, Q&A services produce answers by presenting questions to the general public or associated digital community with little regard for the amount of time users spend examining and answering them. Ultimately, a question may receive large amounts of attention but still not be answered adequately. Several existing pieces of research investigate the reasons why questions do not receive answers on Q&A services and suggest that it may be associated with users being afraid of expressing themselves. Q&A works well for solving information needs, however, it rarely takes into account the privacy requirements of the users who form the service. This thesis was motivated by the need for a more targeted approach towards Q&A by distributing the service across ad hoc networks. The main contribution of this thesis is a novel routing technique and networking environment (distributed Q&A) which balances answer quality and user attention while protecting privacy through plausible deniability. Routing approaches are evaluated experimentally by statistics gained from peer-to-peer network simulations, composed of Q&A users modelled via features extracted from the analysis of a large Yahoo! Answers dataset. Suggestions for future directions to this work are presented from the knowledge gained from our results and conclusion