SECURING HEALTHGRID ENVIRONMENTS

Christos Ilioudis, Dimitrios Baltatzis, George Pangalos, Christos Georgiadis

2007

Abstract

Grid technologies promise to change the way that health organizations tackle complex problems by offering unprecedented opportunities for resource sharing and collaboration. Healthgrids are Grid infrastructures comprising applications, services or middleware components that deal with the specific problems arising in the processing of biomedical data. Resources in Healthgrids are databases, computing power, medical expertise and even medical devices. Securing this new environment in Health organizations is a major issue today. Security considerations and more specifically authorization decisions is a critical problem. Personal data is confidential, so access to the information must be restricted to authorized and authenticated persons. Furthermore data must be protected to guarantee its confidentiality and integrity. This work provides a suitable authorization mechanism that facilitates the usage of grid and agent technology in HealthGrid environments. More specifically, our approach applies the RBAC access control model for dynamically assigning security roles to visiting agents on hosts of the HealthGrid environment. Our methodology proposes a flexible role decomposition method, which facilitates the role assignment process. The role decomposition relies on a set of common Attribute Fields, shared between Grid’s hosts, filled with Attribute values that every host evaluates according to its security goals. In any case, every host participating in the grid retains its security policy without altering or compromising its security policy in order to participate in the agent exchange process. The proposed process and the related assignment algorithms have been experimentally implemented and applied in a typical health environment. The results have shown that the proposed framework is applicable and implementable, and can be applied successfully in real life health care environments.

Paper Citation

in Harvard Style

Ilioudis C., Baltatzis D., Pangalos G. and Georgiadis C. (2007). SECURING HEALTHGRID ENVIRONMENTS . In Proceedings of the Second International Conference on Security and Cryptography - Volume 1: SECRYPT, (ICETE 2007) ISBN 978-989-8111-12-8, pages 394-401. DOI: 10.5220/0002123203940401

in Bibtex Style

@conference{secrypt07,
author={Christos Ilioudis and Dimitrios Baltatzis and George Pangalos and Christos Georgiadis},
title={SECURING HEALTHGRID ENVIRONMENTS},
booktitle={Proceedings of the Second International Conference on Security and Cryptography - Volume 1: SECRYPT, (ICETE 2007)},
year={2007},
pages={394-401},
publisher={SciTePress},
organization={INSTICC},
doi={10.5220/0002123203940401},
isbn={978-989-8111-12-8},
}

in EndNote Style

TY - CONF
JO - Proceedings of the Second International Conference on Security and Cryptography - Volume 1: SECRYPT, (ICETE 2007)
TI - SECURING HEALTHGRID ENVIRONMENTS
SN - 978-989-8111-12-8
AU - Ilioudis C.
AU - Baltatzis D.
AU - Pangalos G.
AU - Georgiadis C.
PY - 2007
SP - 394
EP - 401
DO - 10.5220/0002123203940401