Projects

Trustworthy Health and Wellness (THaW)

Traditional hospital information systems are built around the idea that there is a large computer in the hospital and terminals to access it throughout the hospital. However, this model of such systems is being challenged by the advantages of mobile computing with data managed in clouds and the idea that not all health data is collected in hospitals and clinics. These trends raise many issues about security and privacy that generat research problems that will challenge smooth and effective adoption of these promising alternative architectures and capabilities. THaW is a NSF Frontier project that focuses on a wide range of research issues in these important and sensitive areas. It is a collaboration between five universities and its project web page can be found here. This page lists some of the THaW work being done by Illinois Security Lab. Some of our areas of focus include security and privacy for genomic data and for heath apps on smartphones.

Strategic Healthcare IT Advanced Research Projects on Security (SHARPS)

SHARPS is developing techniques to reduce security and privacy risks that pose barriers to the meaningful use of health information technology. Areas of focus include electronic health records, health information exchanges, and telemedicine. The project includes investigations into policy considerations, service models, and open validation benchmarks. It is a multi-disciplinary and multi-institutional effort that involves cyber-security experts and physicians at a dozen academic institutions advised by a panel of leaders from industry, government, and advocacy groups.

Experience-Based Access Management (EBAM)

EBAM is a methodology for using experience from access logs to narrow the gap between the ideal access rights of principals  and the enforced controls that the system must use in practice.  The EBAM project focuses on applications of this strategy in health information systems.  The startegy involves developing an expected model of access rights based on attribute-based rule sets informed by probabilistic analysis. EBAM is a multi-institutional collaboration between experts in bioinformatics, cyber-security, and hospital information technology.

Trustworthy Cyber-Infrastructure for Power (TCIP)

Electrical power systems are becoming increasingly dependent on data networking and computer control. This opens the electrical power grid to high-risk cyber-security threats that attack the integrity and availability of the system. This project is developing secure platforms for advanced power meters and secure communication techniques for control system networks as part of the TCIP Center. It is also exploring policy issues for the Smart Grid.

Formalizing Operator Task Analysis (FOTA)

FOTA explores ways to formally model and reason about human operators’ task descriptions and the risks entailed in operator errors. The analysis is based on the use of concurrent game structures applied to an engineered concept of protection envelope that prevents key operator errors from developing into hazards.

Security for Building Automation Systems

Building Automation Systems (BASs) support facilities management by connecting building actuators and sensors to data networks and enabling computer control. Such systems have great potential for applications, but many of these applications open new security risks because they increase the attack surface of the BAS. This project is developing security architectures and principles for BAS middleware, with a focus on strategies for limiting the risks in connecting the BAS to an enterprise information system.

Attribute-Based Messaging and Security

Messaging and security systems can benefit from using attributes of people and data to route messages and make access decisions. Such information can be extracted from enterprise information systems such as human resources records or labels on data and used to improve the privacy and efficiency of messaging and the management of access permissions to enterprise data resources. This project is developing theory, architectures, and applications for communication and information systems based on automated use and management of attributes.

DoS Models and Countermeasures

Denial of Service (DoS) attacks deplete the resources of target systems to deny service to legitimate users. Preventing such attacks is quite difficult because of fundamental design decisions in the Internet and in wireless systems. This project is developing better theoretical models for DoS and using these to inspire and analyze new types of countermeasures. The project also investigates a range of topics in network security such as tunnels, firewalls, browsers, and DoS for wireless communications.

Cyber-Security for Assisted Living

Assisted Living exploits networking and personal medical devices to enable remote monitoring of vital signs of people in their homes. Such monitoring raises concerns for security and privacy, which must meet standards appropriate to communication of data that is both safety-critical and personally sensitive. This project developed architectures, prototypes, and formal analysis for an Assisted Living Service Provider (ALSP) and a Medical Mediator.

Formal Privacy

Privacy has social, legal, commercial, and technological dimensions, where each dimension deeply influences the others. Worldwide, citizens have in many cases asked their governments to provide them with basic privacy assurances for their interactions with businesses. Such regulations can be complicated and impede businesses from effective operation. This project focused on the formal description and analysis of privacy regulations with an aim to understand their consequences and contribute to efforts to build compliant information systems.

Last updated on Wednesday, April 20, 2016, 6:45 pm