Mina Deng

A Home Healthcare System in the Cloud--Addressing Security and Privacy Challenges

Cloud computing is an emerging technology that is expected to support Internet scale critical applications which could be essential to the healthcare sector. Its scalability, resilience, adaptability, connectivity, cost reduction, and high performance features have high potential to lift the efficiency and quality of healthcare. However, it is also important to understand specific risks related to security and privacy that this technology brings. This paper focuses on a home healthcare system based on cloud computing. It introduces several use cases and draws an architecture based on the cloud. A comprehensive methodology is used to integrate security and privacy engineering process into the software development lifecycle. In particular, security and privacy challenges are identified in the proposed cloud-based home healthcare system. Moreover, a functional infrastructure plan is provided to demonstrate the integration between the proposed application architecture with the cloud infrastructure. Finally, the paper discusses several mitigation techniques putting the focus on patient-centric control and policy enforcement via cryptographic technologies, and consequently on digital rights management and attribute based encryption technologies.

Towards trustworthy health platform cloud

To address today’s major concerns of health service providers regarding security, resilience and data protection when moving on the cloud, we propose an approach to build a trustworthy healthcare platform cloud, based on a trustworthy cloud infrastructure. This paper first highlights the main security and privacy risks of market available commodity clouds, and outlines security and privacy requirements of a trustworthy health platform cloud, on top of which to deploy various health applications, in compliance with EU data protection legislation. Results from the recent EU TClouds project will be described as a possible solution towards trustworthy cloud architecture, based on a federated cloud-of-clouds, while enforcing security, resilience and data protection in various cloud layers for provisioning trustworthy IaaS, PaaS and SaaS healthcare services.

Trustworthy middleware services in the cloud

Establishing trust in systems is a difficult problem to tackle. In the Cloud, establishing trust is even more complicated considering its dynamic nature and distributed resources. One of the Clouds potential feature is providing transparent management of resources at Clouds infrastructure. This would hide technical complexities from Clouds customers, which could be provided using middleware services. Establishing trustworthy middleware services would help in moving in the direction of establishing trust in the Cloud. In this paper we mainly focus on identifying the functions for establishing trustworthy middleware services for supporting home healthcare application. Specifically, we focus on the ones that are required to address the security, privacy, and resilience properties of home healthcare application.