Tatiana Ermakova - Academia.edu (original) (raw)
Uploads
Papers by Tatiana Ermakova
Due to demographic changes, health information technologies comprising electronic health records ... more 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 narrative literature survey deals with the antecedents of these concerns. In particular, this study identifies 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.
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 and immediately after the NSA scandal. Somewhat surprisingly, we also find that in this scenario knowledge about information privacy has no significant effect on information privacy concerns although some relations have been observed in previous empirical studies. Finally, patient information privacy concerns can be mitigated by establishing trust in cloud providers in healthcare as well as in privacy-preserving technological and regulatory mechanisms.
The emerging cloud computing technology enables new scenarios in healthcare. However, there are s... more The emerging cloud computing technology enables new scenarios in healthcare. However, there are still many security and privacy concerns. Although there are numerous publications in the context of cloud computing in healthcare, we found no typical security and privacy requirements framework so far. With this background we survey security and privacy requirements for the use of cloud computing in healthcare. Preparing the ground for a future design science approach to creating secure and privacy-friendly cloud architectures for healthcare, we conduct a systematic literature review, collect and elicit security and privacy requirements to be further evaluated by different experts from the healthcare industry in semi-structured interviews. Further, we apply an established security requirements elicitation methodology to an information exchange scenario based on cloud computing.
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. We first conducted a systematic literature review and interviews with different experts from the German healthcare industry that allowed us to derive real-world processes and corresponding security and privacy requirements. Based on these results, we designed our multi-provider cloud architecture that satisfies many of the requirements by providing increased availability, confidentiality and integrity of the medical records stored in the cloud. This architecture features secret sharing as an important measure to distribute health records as fragments to different cloud services, which can provide higher redundancy and additional security and privacy protection in the case of key compromise, broken encryption algorithms or their insecure implementation. Finally, we evaluate and select a secret-sharing algorithm for our multi-cloud architecture. We implemented both Shamir's secret-sharing scheme and Rabin's information dispersal algorithm and performed several experiments measuring the execution time. Our results indicate that an adoption of Rabin's algorithm would create a low overhead, giving strong indicators to the feasibility of our approach.
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 cloud computing 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.
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.
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.
Due to demographic changes, health information technologies comprising electronic health records ... more 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 narrative literature survey deals with the antecedents of these concerns. In particular, this study identifies 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.
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 and immediately after the NSA scandal. Somewhat surprisingly, we also find that in this scenario knowledge about information privacy has no significant effect on information privacy concerns although some relations have been observed in previous empirical studies. Finally, patient information privacy concerns can be mitigated by establishing trust in cloud providers in healthcare as well as in privacy-preserving technological and regulatory mechanisms.
The emerging cloud computing technology enables new scenarios in healthcare. However, there are s... more The emerging cloud computing technology enables new scenarios in healthcare. However, there are still many security and privacy concerns. Although there are numerous publications in the context of cloud computing in healthcare, we found no typical security and privacy requirements framework so far. With this background we survey security and privacy requirements for the use of cloud computing in healthcare. Preparing the ground for a future design science approach to creating secure and privacy-friendly cloud architectures for healthcare, we conduct a systematic literature review, collect and elicit security and privacy requirements to be further evaluated by different experts from the healthcare industry in semi-structured interviews. Further, we apply an established security requirements elicitation methodology to an information exchange scenario based on cloud computing.
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. We first conducted a systematic literature review and interviews with different experts from the German healthcare industry that allowed us to derive real-world processes and corresponding security and privacy requirements. Based on these results, we designed our multi-provider cloud architecture that satisfies many of the requirements by providing increased availability, confidentiality and integrity of the medical records stored in the cloud. This architecture features secret sharing as an important measure to distribute health records as fragments to different cloud services, which can provide higher redundancy and additional security and privacy protection in the case of key compromise, broken encryption algorithms or their insecure implementation. Finally, we evaluate and select a secret-sharing algorithm for our multi-cloud architecture. We implemented both Shamir's secret-sharing scheme and Rabin's information dispersal algorithm and performed several experiments measuring the execution time. Our results indicate that an adoption of Rabin's algorithm would create a low overhead, giving strong indicators to the feasibility of our approach.
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 cloud computing 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.
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.
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.