Managing Break-The-Glass using Situation-oriented authorizations

Journal of Medical Systems, 2010

OASIS is a non-for-profit consortium that drives the development convergence and adoption of open standards for the global information society. It involves more than 600 organizations and individuals as well as IT leaders Sun, Microsoft, IBM and Oracle. One of its standards is XACML which appeared a few years ago and now there are about 150,000 hits on Google. XACML (eXtensible Access Control Markup Language) is not technology related. Sun published in 2004 open source Sun XACML which is in compliance with XACML 1.0. specification and now works to make it comply with XACML 2.0. The heart of XACML are attributes values of defined type and name that is to be attached to a subject, a resource, an action and an environment in which a subject request action on resource. In that way XACML is to replace Role Based Access Control which dominated for years. The paper examines performances in CEN 13 606 and ISO 22 600 based healthcare system which uses XACML for access control. Keywords Security and privacy. Access control. Electronic Health Record Related work on using XACML At the RSA 2008 Conference, members of the OASIS open standards consortium, in cooperation with the Health Information Technologies Standards Panel (HITSP), demonstrated interoperability of the Extensible Access Control Markup Language (XACML) version 2.0. Simulating a real world scenario provided by the US Department of Veterans Affairs, the demo showed how XACML ensures successful authorization decision requests and the exchange of authorization policies. The XACML Interop at the RSA 2008 conference utilizes requirements from Health Level Seven (HL7), ASTM International, and the American National Standards Institute (ANSI) [1]. For security reasons, enterprises are frequently unwilling to publicize the security mechanisms they use internally, and many deployments of XACML fall into this category. However, a large and growing number of businesses, institutions and university/research groups are now using XACML in their security systems. An example is children's hospital in Boston. The world's first personally controlled health record system, called Personal Internetworked Notary and Guardian (PING), enables a patient to own a complete, secure copy of his/ her record, integrating health information across sites of care and over time. PING utilizes the XACML Library to implement the necessary authorization functionality [2]. Another example is Australian's project NEHTA (National E-Health Transition Authority) which recommends XACML as a standard method of defining access policies for e-health services. [3] Related work on access control standards Commite European de Normalisation (CEN) standard ENV 13606 [4] In 2008 ISO gave ISO 13 606 on Electronic Healthcare Record Architecture. This standard is a revised Commite

2012 International Conference on Computer Communication and Informatics, 2012

In the modern health service, data are accessed by doctors and nurses using mobile, Personal Digital Assistants, and other electronic handheld devices. An individual's health related information is normally stored in a central health repository and it can be accessed only by authorized doctors. However, this Data is prone to be exposed to a number of mobile attacks while being accessed. This paper proposes a framework of using XACML and XML security to support secure, embedded and fine-grained access control policy to control the privacy and data access of health service data accessed through handheld devices. Also we consider one of the models, namely Spatial Role-based access control (SRBAC) and model it using XACML.

Electronic healthcare, while exciting and promising, presents many challenges to patients' Electronic Healthcare Records (EHRs) such as Privacy and Security. Some accumulating evidences show that adding appropriate context in an access control model can help improve the security of EHRs. Contrary to such benefits, researchers in the healthcare environment are yet to harness it as they keep on adopting context proposed in other domains such as Ubiquitous Computing. This act, in turn, reduces the rate of protection of EHRs as wrong contextual information results into wrong access control and hence insecure EHR systems. In this paper we analyse how rich in terms of context the healthcare environment is and then propose relevant contextual attributes for the domain. Moreover we examine the usage of proposed contextual attributes into the existing access control models.

Journal of biomedical …, 2008

Access control is a central problem in privacy management. A common practice in controlling access to sensitive data, such as electronic health records (EHRs), is Role-Based Access Control (RBAC). RBAC is limited as it does not account for the circumstances under which access to sensitive data is requested. Following a qualitative study that elicited access scenarios, we used Object-Process Methodology to structure the scenarios and conceive a Situation-Based Access Control (SitBAC) model. Sit-BAC is a conceptual model, which defines scenarios where patient's data access is permitted or denied. The main concept underlying this model is the Situation Schema, which is a pattern consisting of the entities Data-Requestor, Patient, EHR, Access Task, Legal-Authorization, and Response, along with their properties and relations. The various data access scenarios are expressed via Situation Instances. While we focus on the medical domain, the model is generic and can be adapted to other domains.

l”. In the Proceedings of the 2012 International Conference on Computer Communication and Informatics (ICCCI-2012), Jan. 10 – 12, 2012, Coimbatore, INDIA. The proceeding published in IEEEXplore

In the modern health service, data are accessed by doctors and nurses using mobile, Personal Digital Assistants, and other electronic handheld devices. An individual's health related information is normally stored in a central health repository and it can be accessed only by authorized doctors. However, this Data is prone to be exposed to a number of mobile attacks while being accessed. This paper proposes a framework of using XACML and XML security to support secure, embedded and fine-grained access control policy to control the privacy and data access of health service data accessed through handheld devices. Also we consider one of the models, namely Spatial Role-based access control (SRBAC) and model it using XACML.

March 29-30, 2015 Singapore, 2015

In a cloud provisioned medical healthcare system, it is very important to ensure that resources and sensitive information (such as prescriptions, medical records and lab test data, etc) are accessed by and provided to authorized users and tenants whenever needed to be accessed. By using Attribute-Based Access Control (ABAC), not only role of the user but also other attributes, such as which resources he is allowed to access, what actions he is allowed to perform on those resources, what time of the date, whether he is at office or not and so on, are used for the fine-grained access control decision. Global policies are also needed to access and protect patient information from unauthorized access and to provide privacy. This ensures who can access what, under what conditions, and for what purpose. In the proposed system, XACML 3.0 standard is implemented to develop a prototype application. Through cloud computing platform (WSO2 Servers), the system can support the patients and healthcare workers to access the digital health records in hospitals easily by ensuring the patient's privacy and access to information.

2007 Innovations in Information Technologies (IIT), 2007

Many e-Health portal systems are implemented using off-the-shelf software components. The security features provided by such components are usually insufficient. This paper addresses the issue from the access control perspective. More specifically, we first propose a two-tier approach to access control for e-Health portals. The approach supplements existing Role Based Access Control (RBAC) capabilities with a rule-based access control module based on the classical Flexible Authorization Framework (FAF) model. We study conflict resolution and interaction between the two modules. We also address authentication for real-time services provided by remote service providers.

IEEE Transactions on Information Technology in Biomedicine, 2003

The design of proper models for authorization and access control for electronic patient record (EPR) is essential to a wide scale use of EPR in large health organizations. In this paper, we propose a contextual role-based access control authorization model aiming to increase the patient privacy and the confidentiality of patient data, whereas being flexible enough to consider specific cases. This model regulates user's access to EPR based on organizational roles. It supports a role-tree hierarchy with authorization inheritance; positive and negative authorizations; static and dynamic separation of duties based on weak and strong role conflicts. Contextual authorizations use environmental information available at access time, like user/patient relationship, in order to decide whether a user is allowed to access an EPR resource. This enables the specification of a more flexible and precise authorization policy, where permission is granted or denied according to the right and the need of the user to carry out a particular job function.

Intelligent Decision Technologies, 2021

In emergency situations, different actors involved in first aid services should be authorized to retrieve information from the patient's Electronic Health Records (EHRs). The research objectives of this work involve the development and implementation of methods to characterise emergency situations requiring extraordinary access to healthcare data. The aim is to implement such methods based on contextual information pertaining to specific patients and emergency situations and also leveraging personalisation aspects which enable the efficient access control on sensitive data during emergencies. The Attribute Based Access Control paradigm is used in order to grant access to EHRs based on contextual information. We introduce an ABAC approach using personalized context handlers, in which raw contextual information can be uplifted in order to recognize critical situations and grant access to healthcare data. Results indicate that context-aware ABAC is a very effective method for detecting critical situations that require emergency access to personal health records. In comparison to RBAC implementations of emergency access control to EHRs, the proposed ABAC implementation leverages contextual information pertaining to the specific patient and emergency situations. Contextual information increases the capability of ABAC to recognize critical situations and grant access to healthcare data.