Pete Bramhall

A flexible role-based secure messaging service: exploiting IBE technology for privacy in health care

The management of private and confidential information is a major problem for dynamic organizations. Secure solutions are needed to exchange confidential documents, protect them against unauthorized accesses and cope with changes of peoples roles and permissions. Traditional cryptographic systems and PKI show their limitations, in terms of flexibility and manageability. This paper describes an innovative technical solution in the area of secure messaging that exploits identifier-based encryption (IBE) technology. It illustrates the advantages against a similar approach based on traditional cryptography and PKI. It discusses a few open issues. Our main contribution is a practical solutions based on IBE technology. A secure messaging system based on IBE has been fully implemented and it is currently used in a trial with a UK health service organization.

Towards accountable management of privacy and identity information

Digital identities and profiles are valuable assets: they are more and more relevant to allow people to access services and information on the Internet. They need to be secured and protected. Unfortunately people have little control over the destiny of this information once it has been disclosed to third parties. People rely on enterprises and organizations for its management. In most cases this is a matter of trust. This paper describes an approach to make organizations more accountable, provide strong but not impregnable privacy enforcement mechanisms and allow users to be more involved in the management of the privacy of their confidential information. As part of our ongoing research, we introduce a technical solution based on ”sticky” privacy policies and tracing services that leverages Identifier-based Encryption (IBE) along with trusted platform technologies such as TCPA (TCG) and Tagged Operating Systems. Work is in progress to prototype this solution.

Intelligent Security Data Analysis

In this paper, we examine issues related to the research and applications of computational intelligence techniques in security data analysis. We focus on solve problems that involve incomplete, vague or uncertain information, which is difficult to come to a crisp solution. It is shown how an extended mass assignment framework can be used to extract relations between soft categories. These relations are association rules and are useful when integrating multiple information sources. Experimental results on terrorism incident databases and Web search logs, respectively relating to national security and user behaviour profiling, are demonstrated and discussed in this paper.