Data-centric privacy protocol for intensive care grids

Abstract

Modern e-Health systems require advanced computing and storage capabilities, leading to the adoption of technologies like the grid and giving birth to novel health grid systems. In particular, intensive care medicine uses this paradigm when facing a high flow of data coming from intensive care units (ICU) inpatients just like demonstrated by the ICGrid system prototyped by the University of Cyprus. Unfortunately, moving an ICU patients data from the traditionally isolated hospitals computing facilities to data grids via public networks (i.e., the Internet) makes it imperative to establish an integral and standardized security solution to avoid common attacks on the data and metadata being managed. Particular emphasis must be put on the patients personal data, the protection of which is required by legislations in many countries of the European Union and the world in general. In this paper, we extend our previous research with the following contributions: 1) a mandatory access control model to protect patients metadata

2) a major security revision to our previously proposed privacy protocol by contributing with a quality of security quantitative metric to improve fragmented datas assurance

and finally, 3) a set of early results to demonstrate that our protocol not only improves a patient personal datas security and privacy but also achieves a performance comparable with existing approaches. © 2006 IEEE.