Secure data sharing and processing in heterogeneous clouds

The extensive cloud adoption among the European Public Sector Players empowered them to own and operate a range of cloud infrastructures. These deployments vary both in the size and capabilities, as well as in the range of employed technologies and processes. The public sector, however, lacks the necessary technology to enable effective, interoperable and secure integration of a multitude of its computing clouds and services. In this work we focus on the federation of private clouds and the approaches that enable secure data sharing and processing among the collaborating infrastructures and services of public entities. We investigate the aspects of access control, data and security policy languages, as well as cryptographic approaches that enable fine-grained security and data processing in semi-trusted environments. We identify the main challenges and frame the future work that serve as an enabler of interoperability among heterogeneous infrastructures and services. Our goal is to enable both security and legal conformance as well as to facilitate transparency, privacy and effectivity of private cloud federations for the public sector needs. © 2015 The Authors

Enhancing Confidentiality and Privacy Preservation in e-Health to Enhanced Security

Electronic health (e-health) system use is growing, which has improved healthcare services significantly but has created questions about the privacy and security of sensitive medical data. This research suggests a novel strategy to overcome these difficulties and strengthen the security of e-health systems while maintaining the privacy and confidentiality of patient data by utilising machine learning techniques. The security layers of e-health systems are strengthened by the comprehensive framework we propose in this paper, which incorporates cutting-edge machine learning algorithms. The suggested framework includes data encryption, access control, and anomaly detection as its three main elements. First, to prevent unauthorised access during transmission and storage, patient data is secured using cutting-edge encryption technologies. Second, to make sure that only authorised staff can access sensitive medical records, access control mechanisms are strengthened using machine learning models that examine user behaviour patterns. This research's inclusion of machine learning-based anomaly detection is its most inventive feature. The technology may identify variations from typical data access and usage patterns, thereby quickly spotting potential security breaches or unauthorised activity, by training models on past e-health data. This proactive strategy improves the system's capacity to successfully address new threats. Extensive experiments were carried out employing a broad dataset made up of real-world e-health scenarios to verify the efficacy of the suggested approach. The findings showed a marked improvement in the protection of confidentiality and privacy, along with a considerable decline in security breaches and unauthorised access events

Security and Privacy Issues in Wireless Mesh Networks: A Survey

This book chapter identifies various security threats in wireless mesh network (WMN). Keeping in mind the critical requirement of security and user privacy in WMNs, this chapter provides a comprehensive overview of various possible attacks on different layers of the communication protocol stack for WMNs and their corresponding defense mechanisms. First, it identifies the security vulnerabilities in the physical, link, network, transport, application layers. Furthermore, various possible attacks on the key management protocols, user authentication and access control protocols, and user privacy preservation protocols are presented. After enumerating various possible attacks, the chapter provides a detailed discussion on various existing security mechanisms and protocols to defend against and wherever possible prevent the possible attacks. Comparative analyses are also presented on the security schemes with regards to the cryptographic schemes used, key management strategies deployed, use of any trusted third party, computation and communication overhead involved etc. The chapter then presents a brief discussion on various trust management approaches for WMNs since trust and reputation-based schemes are increasingly becoming popular for enforcing security in wireless networks. A number of open problems in security and privacy issues for WMNs are subsequently discussed before the chapter is finally concluded.Comment: 62 pages, 12 figures, 6 tables. This chapter is an extension of the author's previous submission in arXiv submission: arXiv:1102.1226. There are some text overlaps with the previous submissio

Obligations of trust for privacy and confidentiality in distributed transactions

Purpose – This paper aims to describe a bilateral symmetric approach to authorization, privacy protection and obligation enforcement in distributed transactions. The authors introduce the concept of the obligation of trust (OoT) protocol as a privacy assurance and authorization mechanism that is built upon the XACML standard. The OoT allows two communicating parties to dynamically exchange their privacy and authorization requirements and capabilities, which the authors term a notification of obligation (NoB), as well as their commitments to fulfilling each other's requirements, which the authors term signed acceptance of obligations (SAO). The authors seek to describe some applicability of these concepts and to show how they can be integrated into distributed authorization systems for stricter privacy and confidentiality control. Design/methodology/approach – Existing access control and privacy protection systems are typically unilateral and provider-centric, in that the enterprise service provider assigns the access rights, makes the access control decisions, and determines the privacy policy. There is no negotiation between the client and the service provider about which access control or privacy policy to use. The authors adopt a symmetric, more user-centric approach to privacy protection and authorization, which treats the client and service provider as peers, in which both can stipulate their requirements and capabilities, and hence negotiate terms which are equally acceptable to both parties. Findings – The authors demonstrate how the obligation of trust protocol can be used in a number of different scenarios to improve upon the mechanisms that are currently available today. Practical implications – This approach will serve to increase trust in distributed transactions since each communicating party receives a difficult to repudiate digitally signed acceptance of obligations, in a standard language (XACML), which can be automatically enforced by their respective computing machinery. Originality/value – The paper adds to current research in trust negotiation, privacy protection and authorization by combining all three together into one set of standardized protocols. Furthermore, by providing hard to repudiate signed acceptance of obligations messages, this strengthens the legal case of the injured party should a dispute arise