National and Transnational Security Implications of Asymmetric Access to and Use of Biological Data

Biology and biotechnology have changed dramatically during the past 20 years, in part because of increases in computational capabilities and use of engineering principles to study biology. The advances in supercomputing, data storage capacity, and cloud platforms enable scientists throughout the world to generate, analyze, share, and store vast amounts of data, some of which are biological and much of which may be used to understand the human condition, agricultural systems, evolution, and environmental ecosystems. These advances and applications have enabled: (1) the emergence of data science, which involves the development of new algorithms to analyze and visualize data; and (2) the use of engineering approaches to manipulate or create new biological organisms that have specific functions, such as production of industrial chemical precursors and development of environmental bio-based sensors. Several biological sciences fields harness the capabilities of computer, data, and engineering sciences, including synthetic biology, precision medicine, precision agriculture, and systems biology. These advances and applications are not limited to one country. This capability has economic and physical consequences, but is vulnerable to unauthorized intervention. Healthcare and genomic information of patients, information about pharmaceutical and biotechnology products in development, and results of scientific research have been stolen by state and non-state actors through infiltration of databases and computer systems containing this information. Countries have developed their own policies for governing data generation, access, and sharing with foreign entities, resulting in asymmetry of data sharing. This paper describes security implications of asymmetric access to and use of biological data

Guidelines for the Development of Comprehensive Care Centers for Congenital Adrenal Hyperplasia: Guidance from the CARES Foundation Initiative

Patients with rare and complex diseases such as congenital adrenal hyperplasia (CAH) often receive fragmented and inadequate care unless efforts are coordinated among providers. Translating the concepts of the medical home and comprehensive health care for individuals with CAH offers many benefits for the affected individuals and their families. This manuscript represents the recommendations of a 1.5 day meeting held in September 2009 to discuss the ideal goals for comprehensive care centers for newborns, infants, children, adolescents, and adults with CAH. Participants included pediatric endocrinologists, internal medicine and reproductive endocrinologists, pediatric urologists, pediatric surgeons, psychologists, and pediatric endocrine nurse educators. One unique aspect of this meeting was the active participation of individuals personally affected by CAH as patients or parents of patients. Representatives of Health Research and Services Administration (HRSA), New York-Mid-Atlantic Consortium for Genetics and Newborn Screening Services (NYMAC), and National Newborn Screening and Genetics Resource Center (NNSGRC) also participated. Thus, this document should serve as a “roadmap” for the development phases of comprehensive care centers (CCC) for individuals and families affected by CAH

Guidelines for the Development of Comprehensive Care Centers for Congenital Adrenal Hyperplasia: Guidance from the CARES Foundation Initiative

Patients with rare and complex diseases such as congenital adrenal hyperplasia (CAH) often receive fragmented and inadequate care unless efforts are coordinated among providers. Translating the concepts of the medical home and comprehensive health care for individuals with CAH offers many benefits for the affected individuals and their families. This manuscript represents the recommendations of a 1.5 day meeting held in September 2009 to discuss the ideal goals for comprehensive care centers for newborns, infants, children, adolescents, and adults with CAH. Participants included pediatric endocrinologists, internal medicine and reproductive endocrinologists, pediatric urologists, pediatric surgeons, psychologists, and pediatric endocrine nurse educators. One unique aspect of this meeting was the active participation of individuals personally affected by CAH as patients or parents of patients. Representatives of Health Research and Services Administration (HRSA), New York-Mid-Atlantic Consortium for Genetics and Newborn Screening Services (NYMAC), and National Newborn Screening and Genetics Resource Center (NNSGRC) also participated. Thus, this document should serve as a “roadmap” for the development phases of comprehensive care centers (CCC) for individuals and families affected by CAH

Guidelines for the Development of Comprehensive Care Centers for Congenital Adrenal Hyperplasia: Guidance from the CARES Foundation Initiative

Abstract Patients with rare and complex diseases such as congenital adrenal hyperplasia (CAH) often receive fragmented and inadequate care unless efforts are coordinated among providers. Translating the concepts of the medical home and comprehensive health care for individuals with CAH offers many benefits for the affected individuals and their families. This manuscript represents the recommendations of a 1.5 day meeting held in September 2009 to discuss the ideal goals for comprehensive care centers for newborns, infants, children, adolescents, and adults with CAH. Participants included pediatric endocrinologists, internal medicine and reproductive endocrinologists, pediatric urologists, pediatric surgeons, psychologists, and pediatric endocrine nurse educators. One unique aspect of this meeting was the active participation of individuals personally affected by CAH as patients or parents of patients. Representatives of Health Research and Services Administration (HRSA), New York-Mid-Atlantic Consortium for Genetics and Newborn Screening Services (NYMAC), and National Newborn Screening and Genetics Resource Center (NNSGRC) also participated. Thus, this document should serve as a "roadmap" for the development phases of comprehensive care centers (CCC) for individuals and families affected by CAH

Dynamic management of computation and communication resources to enable secure high-performances applications

Ph.D.Karsten Schwa

Dynamic Authentication for High-Performance Networked Applications

Both government and business are increasingly interested in addressing the growing threats imposed by the lack of adequate information security. Consistent with these efforts, our work focuses on the integrity and protection of information exchanged in high-performance networked computing applications such as video teleconferencing and other streamed interactive data exchanges. For these applications, security procedures are often omitted in the interest of performance. Since this may not be acceptable when using public communications media, our research makes explicit and then utilizes the inherent tradeoffs in realizing performance vs. security in communications. In this paper, we expand the notion of QoS to include the level of security that can be offered within performance and CPU resource availability constraints. To address performance and security tradeoffs in asymmetric and dynamic client-server environments, we developed Authenticast, a dynamically configurable, user-level communications protocol, offering variable levels of security throughout execution. The Authenticast protocol comprises a suite of heuristics to realize dynamic security levels, as well as heuristics that decide when and how to apply dynamic security. To demonstrate this protocol, we have implemented a prototype of a high performance privacy system. We have developed and experimented with a novel security control abstraction with which tradeoffs in security vs. performance may be made explicit and then utilized with dynamic client-server asymmetries. This abstraction is called a security thermostat [12], and interacts directly with Authenticast to enable adaptive security processing. Our results demonstrate overall increased scalability and improved performance when adaptive security is applied to the client-server platform with varying numbers of clients and varying resource availabilities at clients

Authenticast: An Adaptive Protocol for High-Performance, Secure Network Applications

A primary obstacle in the path to successful commercial Internet utilization is the lack of adequate security. Strong security algorithms create tremendous processing overheads and are often omitted in the interest of application performance. If electronic commerce applications are to succeed, then they cannot compromise performance or security. We present Authenticast, an adaptive, user-level authenticated transmission protocol to facilitate a resource utilization balance which enables the existence of high-performance applications with sufficient security to be executed over a public communications medium. Our solution comprises the following contributions: We present the addition of a security allocation parameter, securityLevel, to the Quality of Service (QoS) specification. We introduce the concept of the Security Thermostat to depict Authenticast's dynamic runtime modification of securityLevel based on user requirements or desires. We present the design and implementation of the Authenticast protocol to interface with the "thermostat" concept and facilitate parameter changes during application execution

DRRM: Dynamic Resource Reservation Manager

Much of the success of the Internet can be attributed to the IP "hour-glass" model: IP provides a consistent, best-effort service interface that has allowed the relatively independent development of applications and underlying networking technology. As network services and applications become more complex, so does the task of mapping an application to the appropriate service. We propose a Dynamic Resource Reservation Manager (drrm ) that maps application streams into network services. This entity will shield applications from the details of network services, in the same spirit as the hour-glass model of IP. We describe the architecture and implementation of a drrm , and investigate a key problem that must be solved: determining locations to renegotiate connection parameters. We consider the complexity of finding the optimal locations, and propose heuristics for both on-line and offline cases. We evaluate the performance of the heuristics using several application models. 1 Introductio..