Authors:
Christos Ilioudis
1
;
Dimitrios Baltatzis
1
;
George Pangalos
1
and
Christos Georgiadis
2
Affiliations:
1
Informatics Laboratory, Computers Division, Faculty of Technology, Aristotle University of Thessaloniki, Greece
;
2
University of Macedonia, Greece
Keyword(s):
Authorizations, HealthGrid environment, Mobile agent systems, RBAC.
Related
Ontology
Subjects/Areas/Topics:
Biomedical Engineering
;
Cloud Computing
;
e-Health
;
Health Information Systems
;
Information and Systems Security
;
Platforms and Applications
;
Security for Grid Computing
;
Security in Information Systems
Abstract:
Grid technologies promise to change the way that health organizations tackle complex problems by offering unprecedented opportunities for resource sharing and collaboration. Healthgrids are Grid infrastructures comprising applications, services or middleware components that deal with the specific problems arising in the processing of biomedical data. Resources in Healthgrids are databases, computing power, medical expertise and even medical devices. Securing this new environment in Health organizations is a major issue today. Security considerations and more specifically authorization decisions is a critical problem. Personal data is confidential, so access to the information must be restricted to authorized and authenticated persons. Furthermore data must be protected to guarantee its confidentiality and integrity. This work provides a suitable authorization mechanism that facilitates the usage of grid and agent technology in HealthGrid environments. More specifically, our approach
applies the RBAC access control model for dynamically assigning security roles to visiting agents on hosts of the HealthGrid environment. Our methodology proposes a flexible role decomposition method, which facilitates the role assignment process. The role decomposition relies on a set of common Attribute Fields, shared between Grid’s hosts, filled with Attribute values that every host evaluates according to its security goals. In any case, every host participating in the grid retains its security policy without altering or compromising its security policy in order to participate in the agent exchange process. The proposed process and the related assignment algorithms have been experimentally implemented and applied in a typical health environment. The results have shown that the proposed framework is applicable and implementable, and can be applied successfully in real life health care environments.
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