Securing the E-Health Cloud

This is the title of a paper I wrote together with Hans Löhr and Ahmad-Reza Sadeghi. Today, I have presented it at IHI 2010 in Arlington, Virginia, USA. In this paper, we point out several shortcomings of current e-health solutions and standards, particularly they do not address the client platform security, which is a crucial aspect for the overall security of e-health systems. To fill this gap, we present a security architecture for establishing privacy domains in e-health infrastructures. Our solution provides client platform security and appropriately combines this with network security concepts.

We present two models of e-health clouds: a simple one pertaining Personal Health Records (PHRs), and an advanced one pertaining Electronic Health Records (EHRs). We point out the difference in the paper, and discuss three major security problem areas: (i) data storage and processing, (ii) infrastructure management, and (iii) usability.

To solve on of the problems, i.e., that of client platform security, we propose to construct privacy domains for the patients’ medical data as a technical measure to support the enforce- ment of privacy and data protection policies: Systems (e.g., a client PC) must be able to partition execution environ- ments for applications into separate domains that are iso- lated from each other. Data is kept within a privacy domain, and the domain infrastructure ensures that only authorized entities can join this domain. Moreover, data leakage from the domain is prevented by the security architecture and the domain infrastructure. Therefore, the same system can be used for different work flows that are strictly isolated. The following picture shows the architecture:



Moreover, we discuss in the paper open research challenges in e-health scenarios, in particular those related to healthcare telematics infrastructures.

[Paper] [Slides]