Biblio

Electronic crimes like data breaches in healthcare systems are often a fundamental failures of access control mechanisms. Most of current access control systems do not provide an accessible way to engage users in decision making processes, about who should have access to what data and when. We advocate that a policy ontology can contribute towards the development of an effective access control system by attributing responsibility for data breaches. We propose a responsibility attribution model as a theoretical construct and discuss its implication by introducing a cost model for data breach countermeasures. Then, a policy ontology is presented to realize the proposed responsibility and cost models. An experimental study on the performance of the proposed framework is conducted with respect to a more generic access control framework. The practicality of the proposed solution is demonstrated through a case study from the healthcare domain.

Sharing personal data with other people or organizations over the web has become a common phenomena of our modern life. This type of sharing is usually managed by access control mechanisms that include access control model and policies. However, these models are designed from the organizational perspective and do not provide sufficient flexibility and control to the individuals. Therefore, individuals often cannot control sharing of their personal data based on their personal context. In addition, the existing context-aware access control models usually check contextual condition once at the beginning of the access and do not evaluate the context during an on-going access. Moreover, individuals do not have control to define how often they want to evaluate the context condition for an ongoing access. Wearable devices such as Fitbit and Apple Smart Watch have recently become increasingly popular. This has made it possible to gather an individual's real-time contextual information (e.g., location, blood-pressure etc.) which can be used to enforce continuous authorization to the individual's data resources. In this paper, we introduce a novel data sharing policy model for continuous authorization in subject-driven data sharing. A software prototype has been implemented employing a wearable device to demonstrate continuous authorization. Our continuous authorization framework provides more control to the individuals by enabling revocation of on-going access to shared data if the specified context condition becomes invalid.