Computing and Information Systems - Research Publications
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ItemSecurity-oriented portals for the life sciences(Oxford University Press, 2009)Motivation: The life sciences are broad in scope and cover multi- and inter-disciplinary domains as well as the biological domain. These domains can for example involve researchers from the clinical, social, geo-spatial and computer sciences amongst others, e.g. in understanding genetic variations across a population as might be undertaken through a genome-wide association study. Given, this it is essential that portals for these communities are targeted to the individual expertise of the particular domain scientists. Thus tools available to a bioinformatician through a portal might well be meaningless to a social scientist and vice versa. Furthermore certain domains demand that fine-grained access control on data is supported. In this paper we outline how a portfolio of life science related projects at the National e-Science Centre (NeSC) at the University of Glasgow have benefited from security-oriented portals focused upon ease of access, configuration and usage, where data providers are assumed to be autonomous and able to make their own local fine-grained access control decisions. We describe the basic technologies that underlie these solutions and outline specific case studies in their application in the areas of depression, self-harm and suicide, and in the area of paediatric endocrinology focusing in particular on rare diseases associated with sex development.
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ItemFormalising dynamic trust negotiations in decentralised collaborative e-health systems(IEEE Computer Society, 2007)Access control in decentralised collaborative systems present huge challenges especially where many autonomous entities including organizations, humans, software agents from different security domains seek to access and share resources in a secure and controlled way. Automated trust negotiation (ATN) is one approach that has been proposed for trust discovery and realisation, which enables entities viz. Strangers to access resources across autonomous boundaries through iterative exchange of credentials. Various negotiation strategies have been proposed to protect credential disclosure during trust negotiations. However in some domains such as e-health, not all entities are willing to negotiate credentials or disclose access policies directly to strangers regardless of negotiation strategies and instead prefer to negotiate and disclose sensitive information only to strangers within what we refer to as a circle of trust. In this paper, we introduce a formal model to describe how locally trusted intermediary parties can provide multiple negotiation and delegations hops to protect credentials and access policies. We propose a dynamic trust negotiations (DTN) model that not only protects sensitive information from disclosure but also reduces semantic issues that exist with credentials in decentralized systems. This work is currently being explored and implemented within the e-health domain: specifically in the MRC-funded Virtual Organisation for Trials of Epidemiological Studies (VOTES) project.
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ItemDynamic trust negotiation for flexible e-health collaborations(Association for Computing Machinery, 2008)Security issues have always limited the way we do things. In an organisation we provide security by granting privileges to either identities or roles. However this becomes more challenging when the objective is collaboration across organisational boundaries. Numerous access control approaches exist today to address the cross-boundary control issues. However an optimal approach would be to fold remote security credentials into local security credentials, thereby bridging the gap that makes decentralised security policies for multi-domain collaboration difficult. In this paper, dynamic trust negotiation is presented as a possible optimal approach that provides support for decentralised access control. We show how trust pathways can be established and how remote security credentials could be folded to local security credentials through trust contracts.