Secure Management of Personal Health Records by Applying Attribute-Based Encryption

The confidentiality of personal health records is a major problem when patients use commercial Web-based systems to store their health data. Traditional access control mechanisms, such as Role-Based Access Control, have several limitations with respect to enforcing access control policies and ensuring data confidentiality. In particular, the data has to be stored on a central server locked by the access control mechanism, and the data owner loses control on the data from the moment when the data is sent to the requester. Therefore, these mechanisms do not fulfil the requirements of data outsourcing scenarios where the third party storing the data should not have access to the plain data, and it is not trusted to enforce access control policies. In this paper, we describe a new approach which enables secure storage and controlled sharing of patient’s health records in the aforementioned scenarios. A new variant of a ciphertext-policy attribute-based encryption scheme is proposed to enforce patient/organizational access control policies such that everyone can download the encrypted data but only authorized users from the social domain (e.g. family, friends, or fellow patients) or authorized users from the professional\ud domain (e.g. doctors or nurses) are allowed to decrypt it

Towards Data Protection Compliance

Privacy and data protection are fundamental issues nowadays for every organization. This paper calls for the development of methods, techniques and infrastructure to allow the deployment of privacy-aware IT systems, in which humans are integral part of the organizational processes and accountable for their possible misconduct. In particular, we discuss the challenges to be addressed in order to improve organizations privacy practices, as well as the approach to ensure compliance with legal requirements and increasing efficiency

Outage Probability Analysis of RF/FSO-VLC Communication Relaying System

This paper presents an analysis of the asymmetric relaying system which provides communication between hybrid outdoor sub-system and indoor visible light communications (VLC) access points. The outdoor sub-system represents a hybrid radio-frequency (RF)/free-space optical (FSO) system, introduced to reduce the impact of weather conditions on transmission quality. Closed-form outage probability analytical expression is derived. Numerical results are presented and confirmed by Monte Carlo simulations. The effects of system and channel parameters on the outage probability performance are investigated and discussed. Greater optical transmitted power of the VLC subsystem reflects in better system performance, as well as lower indoor environment height. When the indoor room is higher, the propagation of the optical signal is longer, and there will be greater power dissipation and performance deterioration. In addition, the outage probability floor is noticed, which is important limiting factor for relaying system design.Comment: Published in: 2018 11th International Symposium on Communication Systems, Networks & Digital Signal Processing (CSNDSP

Prediction of 3D Body Parts from Face Shape and Anthropometric Measurements

While 3D body models have been vastly studied in the last decade, acquiring accurate models from the sparse information about the subject and few computational resources is still a main open challenge. In this paper, we propose a methodology for finding the most relevant anthropometric measurements and facial shape features for the prediction of the shape of an arbitrary segmented body part. For the evaluation, we selected 12 features that are easy to obtain or measure including age, gender, weight and height; and augmented them with shape parameters extracted from 3D facial scans. For each subset of features, with and without facial parameters, we predicted the shape of 5 segmented body parts using linear and non-linear regression models. The results show that the modeling approach is effective and giving sub cm reconstruction accuracy. Moreover, adding face shape features always significantly improves the prediction

Attribute-based encryption with encryption and decryption outsourcing

In this paper we propose a new scheme for ciphertext-policy attribute-based encryption that allows outsourcing of computationally expensive encryption and decryption steps. The scheme constitutes an important building block for mobile applications where both the host and users use mobile devices with limited computational power. In the proposed scheme, during encryption the host involves a semi-trusted proxy to encrypt a partially encrypted (by the host) message according to an access policy provided by the host. The proxy is unable to learn the message from this partially encrypted text. A user can only decrypt the stored ciphertext if he possesses secret keys associated with a set of attributes that satisfies the associated policy. To reduce computational load in the decryption step, the user, in his turn, involves a semi-trusted proxy (e.g. a cloud) by deploying the scheme of Green et al. (2011). The cloud is given a transformation key that facilitates construction of an El Gamal-ciphertext from the original ciphertext if the user\u27s attributes satisfy the ciphertext. This El Gamal-ciphertext can be then efficiently decrypted on the user\u27s resource-constrained device. The resulting ABE scheme with encryption and decryption outsourcing is proven to be secure in the generic group model

Improving spare part search for maintenance services using topic modelling

To support the decision-making process in various industrial applications, many companies use knowledge management and Information Retrieval (IR). In an industrial setting, knowledge is extracted from data that is often stored in a semi-structured or unstructured format. As a result, Natural Language Processing (NLP) methods have been applied to a number of IR steps. In this work, we explore how NLP and particularly topic modelling can be used to improve the relevance of spare part retrieval in the context of maintenance services. A proposed methodology extracts topics from short maintenance service reports that also include part replacement data. An intuition behind the proposed methodology is that every topic should represent a specific root cause. Experimental were conducted for an ad-hoc retrieval system of service case descriptions and spare parts. The results have shown that our modification improves a baseline system thus boosting the performance of maintenance service solution recommendation.</p