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The personal health information (PHI) that a health information system (HIS) stores and processes requires special caution to ensure authorized manipulation by system users. A diverse set of best practices, standards, and regulations are in place nowadays to achieve that purpose. To the access control element in a HIS, general data protection regulation (GDPR) will require explicit authorization and informed consent prior to this manipulation of patient information by healthcare practitioners in a system. The adaptations to cope this type of previous authorization on HIS requires not only a clear understanding of technicalities and modification to the underlying computational infrastructure but also the impact on players that interact with this type of system during healthcare service provision, namely patients and healthcare professionals. This article is an effort to understand this effect by means of collecting opinion from both players in a multicentric survey that presents different questions establishing scenarios that reflect this new control and its consequences., (undefined)

Recently, blockchain-based Internet of Medical Things (IoMT) has started to receive more attention in the healthcare domain as it not only improves the care quality using real-time and continuous monitoring but also minimizes the cost of care. However, there is a clear trend to include many entities in IoMT systems, such as IoMT sensor nodes, IoT wearable medical devices, patients, healthcare centers, and insurance companies. This makes it challenging to design a blockchain framework for these systems where scalability is a most critical factor in blockchain technology. Motivated by this observation, in this survey we review the state-of-the-art in blockchain-IoMT systems. Comparison and analysis of such systems prove that there is a substantial gap, which is the negligence of scalability. In this survey, we discuss several approaches proposed in the literature to improve the scalability of blockchain technology, and thus overcoming the above mentioned research gap. These approaches include on-chain and off-chain techniques, based on which we give recommendations and directions to facilitate designing a scalable blockchain-based IoMT system. We also recommended that a designer considers the well-known trilemma along with the various dimensions of a scalable blockchain system to prevent sacrificing security and decentralization as well. Moreover, we raise several research questions regarding benchmarking; addressing these questions could help designers determining the existing bottlenecks, leading to a scalable blockchain.

Wireless Sensor Networks (WSNs) are attracting attention from the research community. One of the key issues is to provide them with privacy protection. In recent years, a huge amount of contributions has been focused on this area. Surveys and literature reviews have also been produced to give a systematic view of the different approaches taken. However, no previous work has focused on privacy models, that is, the set of assumptions made to build the approach. In particular, this paper focuses on this matter by studying 41 papers of the last 5 years. We highlight the great differences appearing among related papers that could make them incompatible to be applied simultaneously. We propose a set of guidelines to build comprehensive privacy models so as to foster their comparability and suitability analysis for different scenarios. This work was supported by the MINECO Grant TIN2013-46469-R (Security and Privacy in the Internet of You (SPINY)) and the CAM Grant S2013/ICE-3095 (Cybersecurity,Data, and Risks (CIBERDINE)), which is cofunded by EuropeanFunds (FEDER). Furthermore, J.M. de Fuentes and L. González-Manzano were also partially supported by the Programa de Ayudas a la Movilidad of Carlos III University of Madrid.

Data provides the basis for emerging scientific and interdisciplinary data-centric applications with the potential of improving the quality of life for the citizens. However, effective data-centric applications demand data management techniques able to process a large volume of data which may include sensitive data, e.g., financial transactions, medical procedures, or personal data. Managing sensitive data requires the enforcement of privacy and access control regulations, particularly, during the execution of queries against datasets that include sensitive and non-sensitive data. In this paper, we tackle the problem of enforcing privacy regulations during query processing, and propose BOUNCER, a privacy-aware query engine over federations of RDF datasets. BOUNCER allows for the description of RDF datasets in terms of RDF molecule templates, i.e., abstract descriptions of the properties of the entities in an RDF dataset and their privacy regulations. Furthermore, BOUNCER implements query decomposition and optimization techniques able to identify query plans over RDF datasets that not only contain the relevant entities to answer a query, but that are also regulated by policies that allow for accessing these relevant entities. We empirically evaluate the effectiveness of the BOUNCER privacy-aware techniques over state-of-the-art benchmarks of RDF datasets. The observed results suggest that BOUNCER can effectively enforce access control regulations at different granularity without impacting the performance of query processing.

PubMed ID: 26057043 Near Field Communication (NFC) is an emerging short-range wireless communication technology that offers great and varied promise in services such as payment, ticketing, gaming, crowd sourcing, voting, navigation, and many others. NFC technology enables the integration of services from a wide range of applications into one single smartphone. NFC technology has emerged recently, and consequently not much academic data are available yet, although the number of academic research studies carried out in the past two years has already surpassed the total number of the prior works combined. This paper presents the concept of NFC technology in a holistic approach from different perspectives, including hardware improvement and optimization, communication essentials and standards, applications, secure elements, privacy and security, usability analysis, and ecosystem and business issues. Further research opportunities in terms of the academic and business points of view are also explored and discussed at the end of each section. This comprehensive survey will be a valuable guide for researchers and academicians, as well as for business in the NFC technology and ecosystem. Publisher's Version

Proof-of-Ownership (PoW) can be an efective deduplication technique to reduce storage requirements, by providing cloud storage servers the capability to guarantee that clients only upload and download files that they are in possession of. In this paper, we propose an attribute symmetric encryption PoW scheme (ase-PoW) for hierarchical environments such as corporations, in which (1) the external cloud service provider is honest-but-curious and (2) there is a exible access control in place to ensure only users with the right privilege can access sensitive files. This is, to the best of our knowledge, the first such scheme and it is built upon the ce-PoW scheme of Gonzalez-Manzano and Orfila (2015). Ase-PoW outperforms ce-PoW in that it does not suffer from content-guessing attacks, it reduces client storage needs and computational workload. This work was partially supported by the MINECO grant TIN2013-46469-R (SPINY: Security and Privacy in the Internet of You) and the CAM grant S2013/ICE-3095 CIBERDINE-CM (CIBERDINE: Cybersecurity, Data, and Risks) funded by Madrid Autonomous Community and co-funded by European funds. L. Gonzalez and J. M. de Fuentes were also supported by the Programa de Ayudas para la Movilidad of Carlos III University of Madrid, Spain.

International audience; The widespread use of Java EE web applications as a means to provide distributed services to remote clients imposes strong security requirements, so that the resources managed by these applications remain protected from unauthorized disclosures and manipulations. For this purpose, the Java EE framework provides developers with mechanisms to define access-control policies. Unfortunately , the variety and complexity of the provided security configuration mechanisms cause the definition and manipulation of a security policy to be complex and error prone. As security requirements are not static, and thus, implemented policies must be changed and reviewed often, discovering and representing the policy at an appropriate abstraction level to enable their understanding and reenginering appears as a critical requirement. To tackle this problem, this paper presents a (model-based) approach aimed to help security experts to visualize, (automatically) analyse and manipulate web security policies.

International audience; Firewalls are an important means to secure critical ICT infrastructures. As configurable off-the-shelf products, the effectiveness of a firewall crucially depends on both the correctness of the implementation itself as well as the correct configuration. While testing the implementation can be done once by the manufacturer, the configuration needs to be tested for each application individually. This is particularly challenging as the configuration, implementing a firewall policy, is inherently complex, hard to understand, administrated by different stakeholders and, thus, difficult to validate.This paper presents a formal model of both stateless and stateful firewalls (packet filters), including network address translation (NAT), to which a specification-based conformance test case generation approach is applied. Furthermore, a verified optimisation technique for this approach is presented: Starting from a formal model for stateless firewalls, a collection of semantics-preserving policy transformation rules and an algorithm that optimises the specification with respect of the number of test cases required for path coverage of the model are derived. We extend an existing approach that integrates verification and testing, i. e., tests and proofs to support conformance testing of network policies.The presented approach is supported by a test framework that allows to test actual firewalls using the test cases generated based on the formal model. Finally, a report on several larger case studies is presented.

Part 2: Web Security; International audience; Security is a critical concern for any information system. Security properties such as confidentiality, integrity and availability need to be enforced in order to make systems safe. In complex environments, where information systems are composed of a number of heterogeneous subsystems, each must participate in their achievement. Therefore, security integration mechanisms are needed in order to 1) achieve the global security goal and 2) facilitate the analysis of the security status of the whole system. For the specific case of access-control, access-control policies may be found in several components (databases, networks and applications) all, supposedly, working together in order to meet the high level security property. In this work we propose an integration mechanism for access-control policies to enable the analysis of the system security. We rely on model-driven technologies and the XACML standard to achieve this goal.

Security is a critical concern for any information system. Security properties such as confidentiality, integrity and availability need to be enforced in order to make systems safe. In complex environments, where information systems are composed by a number of heterogeneous subsystems, each subsystem plays a key role in the global system security. For the specific case of access-control, access-control policies may be found in several components (databases, networksand applications) all, supposedly, working together. Nevertheless since most times these policies have been manually implemented and/or evolved separately they easily become inconsistent. In this context, discovering and understanding which security policies are actually being enforced by the information system comes out as a critical necessity. The main challenge to solve is bridging the gap between the vendor-dependent security features and a higher-level representation that express these policies in a way that abstracts from the specificities of concrete system components, and thus, it´s easier to understand and reason with. This high-level representation would also allow us to implement all evolution/refactoring/manipulation operations on the security policies in a reusable way. In this work we propose such a reverse engineering and integration mechanism for access-control policies. We rely on model-driven technologies to achieve this goal.; La sécurité est une préoccupation essentielle pour tout système d’information. Propriétés de sécurité telles que la confidentialité, l’intégrité et la disponibilité doivent être appliquées afin de rendre les systèmes sures. Dans les environnements complexes, où les systèmes d’information sont composés par un certain nombre de sous-systèmes hétérogènes, chaque sous-système joue un rôle clé dans la sécurité globale du système. Dans le cas spécifique du contrôle d’accès, politiques de contrôle d’accès peuvent être trouvées dans différents composants (bases de données, réseaux, etc.), ces derniers étant sensés travailler ensemble. Néanmoins , puisque la plupart de ces politiques ont été mises en œuvre manuellement et / ou évolué séparément ils deviennent facilement incompatibles. Dans ce contexte, la découverte et compréhension des politiques de sécurité appliquées par le système d’information devient une nécessité critique. Le principal défi à résoudre est de combler le fossé entre les caractéristiques de sécurité dépendant du fournisseur et une représentation de plus haut niveau que exprime ces politiques d’une manière faisant abstraction des spécificités de composants concrètes, et donc, plus facile à comprendre et à raisonner avec. Cette représentation de haut niveau nous permettrait également de mettre en œuvre tous les opérations de évolution / refactoring / manipulation sur les politiques de sécurité d’une manière réutilisable. Dans ce travail, nous proposons un tel mécanisme de rétro-ingénierie et d’intégration des politiques de contrôle d’accès. Nous comptons sur les technologies de l’ingénierie dirigée par les modèles pour atteindre cet objectif .

We present a fine-grained security model to enforce the access control on the shared constraint store in Concurrent Constraint Programming (CCP) languages. We show the model for a non-monotonic version of Soft CCP (SCCP), that is an extension of CCP where the constraints have a preference level associated with them. Crisp constraints can be modeled in the same framework as well. In the considered non-monotonic soft version (NmSCCP), it is also possible to remove constraints from the store. The language can be used for coordinating agents on a common store of information that represents the set of shared resources. In such scenarios, it is clearly important to enforce the integrity and confidentiality rights on the resources, in order, for instance, to hide part of the information to some agents, or to prevent an agent to consume too many resources. Finally, we present a bisimulation relation to check equivalence between two programs written in this language.

International audience; Security policies are ubiquitous in information systems and more generally in the management of sensitive information. Access control policies are probably the most largely used policies but their application goes well beyond this application domain. The enforcement of security policies is useless if some of their key properties like the consistency, for example, cannot be stated and checked. We propose here a framework where the security policies and the systems they are applied on, are specified separately but using a common formalism. This separation allows us not only some analysis of the policy independently of the target system but also the application of a given policy on different systems. Besides the abstract formalism we also explore how rewrite and reduction systems can be used and combined in a rather systematic way to provide executable specifications for this framework. We also propose a notion of system and policy transformation that gives the possibility to study some properties which cannot be expressed only within the initial presentation. We have shown, in particular, how confidentiality, integrity and confinment can be expressed for the BLP policy that does not deal explicitly with information flows but only with objects containing tractable information.