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Model-Based Security Assessment on the Design of a Patient-Centric Data Sharing Platform

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From Data to Models and Back (DataMod 2021)

Abstract

The architectural design of a healthcare data sharing system must cope with security requirements especially when the system integrates different data sources and patient-centric features. The design choices come with different risks, where vulnerabilities and threats highly depend on how the system components interact and depend on each other to operate as well as how it handles the external connections. This paper focuses on security aspects arising early in the design phase of a patient-centric system. The system presents a blend of emergent technologies such as novel authentication methods, blockchain for access control, and a data lake for patient metadata storage and retrieval based on access rules. We exploit a model-based approach to tackle security assessment using attack-defense trees (ADtrees) formalism and other support diagrams altogether as a way to model and analyse potential attack paths to the system and its countermeasures. The modelling approach helps creating a framework to support the attack vectors analysis and the proposal of appropriate defense mechanisms within the system architecture.

The research in this paper was supported by the EU H2020 project SERUMS: Securing Medical Data in Smart Patient-Centric Healthcare Systems (grant code 826278).

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Notes

  1. 1.

    For more information on Serums project please refer to https://www.serums-h2020.org.

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Banton, M., Webber, T., Silvina, A., Bowles, J. (2022). Model-Based Security Assessment on the Design of a Patient-Centric Data Sharing Platform. In: Bowles, J., Broccia, G., Pellungrini, R. (eds) From Data to Models and Back. DataMod 2021. Lecture Notes in Computer Science, vol 13268. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-16011-0_5

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  • DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-16011-0_5

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