Tatiana Ermakova - Academia.edu (original) (raw)
Papers by Tatiana Ermakova
Computers in Industry, 2016
This article addresses security and privacy issues associated with storing data in public cloud s... more This article addresses security and privacy issues associated with storing data in public cloud services. It presents an architecture based on a novel secure cloud gateway that allows client systems to store sensitive data in a semi-trusted multi-cloud environment while providing confidentiality, integrity, and availability of data. This proxy system implements a space-efficient, computationally-secure threshold secret sharing scheme to store shares of a secret in several distinct cloud datastores. Moreover, the system integrates a comprehensive set of security measures and cryptographic protocols to mitigate threats induced by cloud computing. Performance in practice and code quality of the implementation are analyzed in extensive experiments and measurements.
The cloud computing paradigm promises to significantly improve the transfer of crucial medical re... more The cloud computing paradigm promises to significantly improve the transfer of crucial medical records during medical service delivery. However, since cloud computing technology is still known for unsolved security and privacy challenges, severe concerns could prevent patients and medical workers from accepting such an application scenario.
Journal of voice : official journal of the Voice Foundation, Jan 21, 2016
This study aimed to present vocal extent measure (VEM), demonstrate its changes with phonomicrosu... more This study aimed to present vocal extent measure (VEM), demonstrate its changes with phonomicrosurgical treatment in patients with vocal fold polyps (VFPs), and to compare its performance to that of established vocal parameters. This is an individual cohort study. Microlaryngoscopic ablation was executed in 61 patients with manifestation of VFP (28 male, 33 female; 45 ± 13 years [mean ± SD]). Analysis of treatment outcome was based on pre- and postoperative voice function diagnostics and videolaryngostroboscopy. Examination instruments were: auditory-perceptual voice assessment (roughness, breathiness, and overall hoarseness [RBH]-status), voice range profile (VRP), acoustic-aerodynamic analysis, and patients' self-assessment of voice using the voice handicap index. The VEM, a parameter not yet commonly established in phoniatric diagnostics, was calculated from area and shape of the VRP to be compared with the dysphonia severity index (DSI) concerning diagnostic suitability. All...
The emerging cloud computing technology enables new essential scenarios in healthcare, in particu... more The emerging cloud computing technology enables new essential scenarios in healthcare, in particular those of data sharing among practitioners. Nevertheless, their security and privacy concerns still impede the wide adoption of cloud computing in this area. Although there are numerous publications in the context of cloud computing in healthcare, we found no consistent typical security and privacy system requirements framework in this domain so far. Owing to the lack of those studies and preparing the ground for creating secure and privacy-friendly cloud architectures for healthcare, we survey security and privacy system requirements for cloud-based medical data sharing scenarios using two strategies. We base on a systematic design science approach following the literature-driven requirement elicitation strategy and apply an established security requirement elicitation methodology as part of the scenario-driven strategy. Finally, we evaluate and compare the two security and privacy system requirements elicitation strategies used in this paper.
Nowadays, IT resources are increasingly being used in all areas of the health sector. Cloud compu... more Nowadays, IT resources are increasingly being used in all areas of the health sector. Cloud computing offers a promising approach to satisfy the IT needs in a favorable way. Despite numerous publications in the context of cloud computing in healthcare, there is no systematic review on current research so far. This paper addresses the gap and is aimed to identify the state of research and determine the potential areas of future research in the domain. We conduct a structured literature search based on an established framework. Through clustering of the research goals of the found papers we derive research topics including developing cloud-based applications, platforms or brokers, security and privacy mechanisms, and benefit assessments for the use of cloud computing in healthcare. We hence analyze current research results across the topics and deduce areas for future research, e.g., development, validation and improvement of proposed solutions, an evaluation framework.
Over the years, a drastic increase in online information disclosure spurs a wave of concerns from... more Over the years, a drastic increase in online information disclosure spurs a wave of concerns from multiple stakeholders. Among others, users resent the "behind the closed doors" processing of their personal data by companies. Privacy policies are supposed to inform users how their personal information is handled by a website. However, several studies have shown that users rarely read privacy policies for various reasons, not least because limitedly readable policy texts are difficult to understand. Based on our online survey with over 440 responses, we examine the objective and subjective readability of privacy policies and investigate their impact on users' trust in five big Internet services. Our findings show the stronger a user believes in having understood the privacy policy, the higher he or she trusts a web site across all companies we studied. Our results call for making readability of privacy policies more accessible to an average reader.
Health-related personal information is very privacy-sensitive. Online privacy policies inform Web... more Health-related personal information is very privacy-sensitive. Online privacy policies inform Website users about the ways their personal information is gathered, processed and stored. In the light of increasing privacy concerns, privacy policies seem to be an important mechanism for increasing customer loyalty. However, in practice, consumers only rarely read privacy policies, possibly due to the common assumption that policies are hard to read. By designing and implementing an automated extraction and readability analysis toolset, we present the first study that provides empirical evidence on readability of over 5,000 privacy policies of health websites and over 1,000 privacy policies of top e-commerce sites. Our results confirm the difficulty of reading current privacy policies. We further show that health websites' policies are more readable than top e-commerce ones, but policies of non-commercial health websites are worse readable than commercial ones. Our study also provides a solid policy text corpus for further research.
Procedia Computer Science, 2015
ABSTRACT Due to demographic changes, health information technologies comprising electronic health... more ABSTRACT Due to demographic changes, health information technologies comprising electronic health records (EHR), electronic medical records (EMR), personal health records (PHR), remote patient monitoring (RPM) and other healthcare related websites are gaining significant relevance. They constitute a great opportunity for efficiency gains and further benefits. One of the major barriers to their successful adoption involves individual health information privacy concerns. In order to understand their nature and better mitigate them, this literature survey deals with the antecedents of these concerns. In particular, this study identifies the type of information, health status, recipient of information, knowledge of health information technology, experience of privacy invasions, age, gender, and education as highly important characteristics.
2014 IEEE 3rd International Conference on Cloud Networking (CloudNet), 2014
Trusted Cloud Computing, 2014
2013 IEEE 15th Conference on Business Informatics, 2013
The accelerated adoption of cloud computing among enterprises is due to the multiple benefits the... more The accelerated adoption of cloud computing among enterprises is due to the multiple benefits the technology provides, one of them the simplification of inter-organizational information sharing, which is of utmost importance in healthcare. Nevertheless, moving sensitive health records to the cloud still implies severe security and privacy risks. With this background, we present a novel secure architecture for sharing electronic health records in a cloud environment.
The cloud computing paradigm promises to significantly improve the transfer of crucial medical re... more The cloud computing paradigm promises to significantly improve the transfer of crucial medical records during medical service delivery. However, since cloud computing technology is still known for unsolved security and privacy challenges, severe concerns could prevent patients and medical workers from accepting such an application scenario. Owing to the lack of similar studies, we investigate what determines an individual’s information privacy concerns on cloud-based transmission of medical records and whether perceived benefits influence the behavioral intention of individuals to permit medical workers to transfer their medical records via cloud-based services. Based on different established theories, we develop and empirically test a corresponding research model by a survey with more than 260 full responses. Our results show the perceived benefits of this health cloud scenario override the impact of information privacy concerns even in the privacy-sensitive German-speaking area an...
E-Health solutions using the Internet provide many benefits for health centers; hosting such solu... more E-Health solutions using the Internet provide many benefits for health centers; hosting such solutions in public Cloud Computing environments as Software-as-a-Service becomes increasingly popular. However, the deployment of e-health services in shared environments is restricted due to regulations prohibiting medical data access by illegitimate parties, such as cloud computing intermediaries. A pivotal requirement is therefore having security “end-to-end”, namely from a user agent to the server process; yet there is no viable approach for contemporary browser-based SaaS solutions. This paper outlines a blueprint for e-health solution architectures featuring an end-to-end security mechanism to prevent intermediary data access and therefore to ensure appropriate patient data privacy and security. This blueprint is instantiated based on a novel security protocol, the Trusted Cloud Transfer Protocol (TCTP) in the form of a prototype implementation. The evaluation of the prototype demonst...
Health-related personal information is very privacy-sensitive. Online privacy policies inform Web... more Health-related personal information is very privacy-sensitive. Online privacy policies inform Website users about the ways their personal information is gathered, processed and stored. In the light of increasing privacy concerns, privacy policies seem to be an important mechanism for increasing customer loyalty. However, in practice, consumers only rarely read privacy policies, possibly due to the common assumption that policies are hard to read. By designing and implementing an automated extraction and readability analysis toolset, we present the first study that provides empirical evidence on readability of over 5,000 privacy policies of health websites and over 1,000 privacy policies of top e-commerce sites. Our results confirm the difficulty of reading current privacy policies. We further show that health websites’ policies are more readable than top e-commerce ones, but policies of non-commercial health websites are worse readable than commercial ones. Our study also provides a...
Over the years, a drastic increase in online information disclosure spurs a wave of concerns from... more Over the years, a drastic increase in online information disclosure spurs a wave of concerns from multiple stakeholders. Among others, users resent the "behind the closed doors" processing of their personal data by companies. Privacy policies are supposed to inform users how their personal information is handled by a website. However, several studies have shown that users rarely read privacy policies for various reasons, not least because limitedly readable policy texts are difficult to understand. Based on our online survey with over 440 responses, we examine the objective and subjective readability of privacy policies and investigate their impact on users' trust in five big Internet services. Our findings show the stronger a user believes in having understood the privacy policy, the higher he or she trusts a web site across all companies we studied. Our results call for making readability of privacy policies more accessible to an average reader.
The emerging cloud computing technology enables new essential scenarios in healthcare, in particu... more The emerging cloud computing technology enables new essential scenarios in healthcare, in particular those of data sharing among practitioners. Nevertheless, their security and privacy concerns still impede the wide adoption of cloud computing in this area. Although there are numerous publications in the context of cloud computing in healthcare, we found no consistent typical security and privacy system requirements framework in this domain so far. Owing to the lack of those studies and preparing the ground for creating secure and privacy-friendly cloud architectures for healthcare, we survey security and privacy system requirements for cloud-based medical data sharing scenarios using two strategies. We base on a systematic design science approach following the literature-driven requirement elicitation strategy and apply an established security requirement elicitation methodology as part of the scenario-driven strategy. Finally, we evaluate and compare the two security and privacy system requirements elicitation strategies used in this paper.
Information Systems, 2015
In healthcare, inter-organizational sharing and collaborative use of big data become increasingly... more In healthcare, inter-organizational sharing and collaborative use of big data become increasingly important. The cloudcomputing paradigm is expected to provide an environment perfectly matching the needs of collaborating healthcare workers. However, there are still many security and privacy challenges impeding the wide adoption of cloud computing in this domain. In this paper, we present a novel architecture and its implementation for inter-organizational data sharing, which provides a high level of security and privacy for patient data in semi-trusted cloud computing environments. This architecture features attribute-based encryption for selective access authorization and cryptographic secret sharing in order to disperse data across multiple clouds, reducing the adversarial capabilities of curious cloud providers. An implementation and evaluation by several experiments demonstrate the practical feasibility and good performance of our approach.
IEEE Transactions on Industrial Informatics, 2000
The EPCglobal Network is an emerging global information architecture for supporting Radio-Frequen... more The EPCglobal Network is an emerging global information architecture for supporting Radio-Frequency Identification (RFID) in supply chains. Discovery services for the EPCglobal Network are distributed services that serve the following pivotal lookup function: Given an identifier for a real-world object, e.g., an Electronic Product Code (EPC) stored on an RFID tag, they return a list of Internet addresses of services that offer additional information about the object. Since a client's information interests in the EPCglobal Network can be used to create inventory lists and profiles of his physical surroundings, as well as be used for business intelligence on the flow of goods in corporate applications, protecting client privacy becomes crucial. In particular, privacy mechanisms should by design be integrated into discovery services where the client's information interests could be analyzed by many potential adversaries. This paper introduces SHARDIS, a privacy-enhanced discovery service for RFID information based on the peer-to-peer paradigm. The idea is to enhance confidentiality of the client's query against profiling by cryptographically hashing the search EPC and by splitting and distributing the service addresses of interest. Furthermore, a probabilistic analysis of the privacy benefits of SHARDIS is presented. SHARDIS was implemented using the global research platform PlanetLab. Several performance experiments show its practical feasibility for many application areas.
Background: Cloud computing promises to essentially improve healthcare delivery performance. Howe... more Background: Cloud computing promises to essentially improve healthcare delivery performance. However, shifting sensitive medical records to third-party cloud providers could create an adoption hurdle because of security and privacy concerns.
Objectives: This study examines the effect of confidentiality assurance in a cloud- computing environment on individuals’ willingness to accept the infrastructure for inter-organizational sharing of medical data.
Methods: We empirically investigate our research question by a survey with over 260 full responses. For the setting with a high confidentiality assurance, we base on a recent multi-cloud architecture which provides very high confidentiality assurance through a secret-sharing mechanism: Health information is cryptograph- ically encoded and distributed in a way that no single and no small group of cloud providers is able to decode it.
Results: Our results indicate the importance of confidentiality assurance in individuals’ acceptance of health clouds for sensitive medical data. Specifically, this finding holds for a variety of practically relevant circumstances, i.e., in the ab- sence and despite the presence of conventional offline alternatives and along with pseudonymization. On the other hand, we do not find support for the effect of confidentiality assurance in individuals’ acceptance of health clouds for non-sensitive medical data. These results could support the process of privacy engi- neering for health-cloud solutions.
Computers in Industry, 2016
This article addresses security and privacy issues associated with storing data in public cloud s... more This article addresses security and privacy issues associated with storing data in public cloud services. It presents an architecture based on a novel secure cloud gateway that allows client systems to store sensitive data in a semi-trusted multi-cloud environment while providing confidentiality, integrity, and availability of data. This proxy system implements a space-efficient, computationally-secure threshold secret sharing scheme to store shares of a secret in several distinct cloud datastores. Moreover, the system integrates a comprehensive set of security measures and cryptographic protocols to mitigate threats induced by cloud computing. Performance in practice and code quality of the implementation are analyzed in extensive experiments and measurements.
The cloud computing paradigm promises to significantly improve the transfer of crucial medical re... more The cloud computing paradigm promises to significantly improve the transfer of crucial medical records during medical service delivery. However, since cloud computing technology is still known for unsolved security and privacy challenges, severe concerns could prevent patients and medical workers from accepting such an application scenario.
Journal of voice : official journal of the Voice Foundation, Jan 21, 2016
This study aimed to present vocal extent measure (VEM), demonstrate its changes with phonomicrosu... more This study aimed to present vocal extent measure (VEM), demonstrate its changes with phonomicrosurgical treatment in patients with vocal fold polyps (VFPs), and to compare its performance to that of established vocal parameters. This is an individual cohort study. Microlaryngoscopic ablation was executed in 61 patients with manifestation of VFP (28 male, 33 female; 45 ± 13 years [mean ± SD]). Analysis of treatment outcome was based on pre- and postoperative voice function diagnostics and videolaryngostroboscopy. Examination instruments were: auditory-perceptual voice assessment (roughness, breathiness, and overall hoarseness [RBH]-status), voice range profile (VRP), acoustic-aerodynamic analysis, and patients' self-assessment of voice using the voice handicap index. The VEM, a parameter not yet commonly established in phoniatric diagnostics, was calculated from area and shape of the VRP to be compared with the dysphonia severity index (DSI) concerning diagnostic suitability. All...
The emerging cloud computing technology enables new essential scenarios in healthcare, in particu... more The emerging cloud computing technology enables new essential scenarios in healthcare, in particular those of data sharing among practitioners. Nevertheless, their security and privacy concerns still impede the wide adoption of cloud computing in this area. Although there are numerous publications in the context of cloud computing in healthcare, we found no consistent typical security and privacy system requirements framework in this domain so far. Owing to the lack of those studies and preparing the ground for creating secure and privacy-friendly cloud architectures for healthcare, we survey security and privacy system requirements for cloud-based medical data sharing scenarios using two strategies. We base on a systematic design science approach following the literature-driven requirement elicitation strategy and apply an established security requirement elicitation methodology as part of the scenario-driven strategy. Finally, we evaluate and compare the two security and privacy system requirements elicitation strategies used in this paper.
Nowadays, IT resources are increasingly being used in all areas of the health sector. Cloud compu... more Nowadays, IT resources are increasingly being used in all areas of the health sector. Cloud computing offers a promising approach to satisfy the IT needs in a favorable way. Despite numerous publications in the context of cloud computing in healthcare, there is no systematic review on current research so far. This paper addresses the gap and is aimed to identify the state of research and determine the potential areas of future research in the domain. We conduct a structured literature search based on an established framework. Through clustering of the research goals of the found papers we derive research topics including developing cloud-based applications, platforms or brokers, security and privacy mechanisms, and benefit assessments for the use of cloud computing in healthcare. We hence analyze current research results across the topics and deduce areas for future research, e.g., development, validation and improvement of proposed solutions, an evaluation framework.
Over the years, a drastic increase in online information disclosure spurs a wave of concerns from... more Over the years, a drastic increase in online information disclosure spurs a wave of concerns from multiple stakeholders. Among others, users resent the "behind the closed doors" processing of their personal data by companies. Privacy policies are supposed to inform users how their personal information is handled by a website. However, several studies have shown that users rarely read privacy policies for various reasons, not least because limitedly readable policy texts are difficult to understand. Based on our online survey with over 440 responses, we examine the objective and subjective readability of privacy policies and investigate their impact on users' trust in five big Internet services. Our findings show the stronger a user believes in having understood the privacy policy, the higher he or she trusts a web site across all companies we studied. Our results call for making readability of privacy policies more accessible to an average reader.
Health-related personal information is very privacy-sensitive. Online privacy policies inform Web... more Health-related personal information is very privacy-sensitive. Online privacy policies inform Website users about the ways their personal information is gathered, processed and stored. In the light of increasing privacy concerns, privacy policies seem to be an important mechanism for increasing customer loyalty. However, in practice, consumers only rarely read privacy policies, possibly due to the common assumption that policies are hard to read. By designing and implementing an automated extraction and readability analysis toolset, we present the first study that provides empirical evidence on readability of over 5,000 privacy policies of health websites and over 1,000 privacy policies of top e-commerce sites. Our results confirm the difficulty of reading current privacy policies. We further show that health websites' policies are more readable than top e-commerce ones, but policies of non-commercial health websites are worse readable than commercial ones. Our study also provides a solid policy text corpus for further research.
Procedia Computer Science, 2015
ABSTRACT Due to demographic changes, health information technologies comprising electronic health... more ABSTRACT Due to demographic changes, health information technologies comprising electronic health records (EHR), electronic medical records (EMR), personal health records (PHR), remote patient monitoring (RPM) and other healthcare related websites are gaining significant relevance. They constitute a great opportunity for efficiency gains and further benefits. One of the major barriers to their successful adoption involves individual health information privacy concerns. In order to understand their nature and better mitigate them, this literature survey deals with the antecedents of these concerns. In particular, this study identifies the type of information, health status, recipient of information, knowledge of health information technology, experience of privacy invasions, age, gender, and education as highly important characteristics.
2014 IEEE 3rd International Conference on Cloud Networking (CloudNet), 2014
Trusted Cloud Computing, 2014
2013 IEEE 15th Conference on Business Informatics, 2013
The accelerated adoption of cloud computing among enterprises is due to the multiple benefits the... more The accelerated adoption of cloud computing among enterprises is due to the multiple benefits the technology provides, one of them the simplification of inter-organizational information sharing, which is of utmost importance in healthcare. Nevertheless, moving sensitive health records to the cloud still implies severe security and privacy risks. With this background, we present a novel secure architecture for sharing electronic health records in a cloud environment.
The cloud computing paradigm promises to significantly improve the transfer of crucial medical re... more The cloud computing paradigm promises to significantly improve the transfer of crucial medical records during medical service delivery. However, since cloud computing technology is still known for unsolved security and privacy challenges, severe concerns could prevent patients and medical workers from accepting such an application scenario. Owing to the lack of similar studies, we investigate what determines an individual’s information privacy concerns on cloud-based transmission of medical records and whether perceived benefits influence the behavioral intention of individuals to permit medical workers to transfer their medical records via cloud-based services. Based on different established theories, we develop and empirically test a corresponding research model by a survey with more than 260 full responses. Our results show the perceived benefits of this health cloud scenario override the impact of information privacy concerns even in the privacy-sensitive German-speaking area an...
E-Health solutions using the Internet provide many benefits for health centers; hosting such solu... more E-Health solutions using the Internet provide many benefits for health centers; hosting such solutions in public Cloud Computing environments as Software-as-a-Service becomes increasingly popular. However, the deployment of e-health services in shared environments is restricted due to regulations prohibiting medical data access by illegitimate parties, such as cloud computing intermediaries. A pivotal requirement is therefore having security “end-to-end”, namely from a user agent to the server process; yet there is no viable approach for contemporary browser-based SaaS solutions. This paper outlines a blueprint for e-health solution architectures featuring an end-to-end security mechanism to prevent intermediary data access and therefore to ensure appropriate patient data privacy and security. This blueprint is instantiated based on a novel security protocol, the Trusted Cloud Transfer Protocol (TCTP) in the form of a prototype implementation. The evaluation of the prototype demonst...
Health-related personal information is very privacy-sensitive. Online privacy policies inform Web... more Health-related personal information is very privacy-sensitive. Online privacy policies inform Website users about the ways their personal information is gathered, processed and stored. In the light of increasing privacy concerns, privacy policies seem to be an important mechanism for increasing customer loyalty. However, in practice, consumers only rarely read privacy policies, possibly due to the common assumption that policies are hard to read. By designing and implementing an automated extraction and readability analysis toolset, we present the first study that provides empirical evidence on readability of over 5,000 privacy policies of health websites and over 1,000 privacy policies of top e-commerce sites. Our results confirm the difficulty of reading current privacy policies. We further show that health websites’ policies are more readable than top e-commerce ones, but policies of non-commercial health websites are worse readable than commercial ones. Our study also provides a...
Over the years, a drastic increase in online information disclosure spurs a wave of concerns from... more Over the years, a drastic increase in online information disclosure spurs a wave of concerns from multiple stakeholders. Among others, users resent the "behind the closed doors" processing of their personal data by companies. Privacy policies are supposed to inform users how their personal information is handled by a website. However, several studies have shown that users rarely read privacy policies for various reasons, not least because limitedly readable policy texts are difficult to understand. Based on our online survey with over 440 responses, we examine the objective and subjective readability of privacy policies and investigate their impact on users' trust in five big Internet services. Our findings show the stronger a user believes in having understood the privacy policy, the higher he or she trusts a web site across all companies we studied. Our results call for making readability of privacy policies more accessible to an average reader.
The emerging cloud computing technology enables new essential scenarios in healthcare, in particu... more The emerging cloud computing technology enables new essential scenarios in healthcare, in particular those of data sharing among practitioners. Nevertheless, their security and privacy concerns still impede the wide adoption of cloud computing in this area. Although there are numerous publications in the context of cloud computing in healthcare, we found no consistent typical security and privacy system requirements framework in this domain so far. Owing to the lack of those studies and preparing the ground for creating secure and privacy-friendly cloud architectures for healthcare, we survey security and privacy system requirements for cloud-based medical data sharing scenarios using two strategies. We base on a systematic design science approach following the literature-driven requirement elicitation strategy and apply an established security requirement elicitation methodology as part of the scenario-driven strategy. Finally, we evaluate and compare the two security and privacy system requirements elicitation strategies used in this paper.
Information Systems, 2015
In healthcare, inter-organizational sharing and collaborative use of big data become increasingly... more In healthcare, inter-organizational sharing and collaborative use of big data become increasingly important. The cloudcomputing paradigm is expected to provide an environment perfectly matching the needs of collaborating healthcare workers. However, there are still many security and privacy challenges impeding the wide adoption of cloud computing in this domain. In this paper, we present a novel architecture and its implementation for inter-organizational data sharing, which provides a high level of security and privacy for patient data in semi-trusted cloud computing environments. This architecture features attribute-based encryption for selective access authorization and cryptographic secret sharing in order to disperse data across multiple clouds, reducing the adversarial capabilities of curious cloud providers. An implementation and evaluation by several experiments demonstrate the practical feasibility and good performance of our approach.
IEEE Transactions on Industrial Informatics, 2000
The EPCglobal Network is an emerging global information architecture for supporting Radio-Frequen... more The EPCglobal Network is an emerging global information architecture for supporting Radio-Frequency Identification (RFID) in supply chains. Discovery services for the EPCglobal Network are distributed services that serve the following pivotal lookup function: Given an identifier for a real-world object, e.g., an Electronic Product Code (EPC) stored on an RFID tag, they return a list of Internet addresses of services that offer additional information about the object. Since a client's information interests in the EPCglobal Network can be used to create inventory lists and profiles of his physical surroundings, as well as be used for business intelligence on the flow of goods in corporate applications, protecting client privacy becomes crucial. In particular, privacy mechanisms should by design be integrated into discovery services where the client's information interests could be analyzed by many potential adversaries. This paper introduces SHARDIS, a privacy-enhanced discovery service for RFID information based on the peer-to-peer paradigm. The idea is to enhance confidentiality of the client's query against profiling by cryptographically hashing the search EPC and by splitting and distributing the service addresses of interest. Furthermore, a probabilistic analysis of the privacy benefits of SHARDIS is presented. SHARDIS was implemented using the global research platform PlanetLab. Several performance experiments show its practical feasibility for many application areas.
Background: Cloud computing promises to essentially improve healthcare delivery performance. Howe... more Background: Cloud computing promises to essentially improve healthcare delivery performance. However, shifting sensitive medical records to third-party cloud providers could create an adoption hurdle because of security and privacy concerns.
Objectives: This study examines the effect of confidentiality assurance in a cloud- computing environment on individuals’ willingness to accept the infrastructure for inter-organizational sharing of medical data.
Methods: We empirically investigate our research question by a survey with over 260 full responses. For the setting with a high confidentiality assurance, we base on a recent multi-cloud architecture which provides very high confidentiality assurance through a secret-sharing mechanism: Health information is cryptograph- ically encoded and distributed in a way that no single and no small group of cloud providers is able to decode it.
Results: Our results indicate the importance of confidentiality assurance in individuals’ acceptance of health clouds for sensitive medical data. Specifically, this finding holds for a variety of practically relevant circumstances, i.e., in the ab- sence and despite the presence of conventional offline alternatives and along with pseudonymization. On the other hand, we do not find support for the effect of confidentiality assurance in individuals’ acceptance of health clouds for non-sensitive medical data. These results could support the process of privacy engi- neering for health-cloud solutions.