Privacy is increasingly a major concern that prevents the exploitation of the Internet’s full potential. Consumers are concerned about the trustworthiness of the websites to which they entrust their sensitive information. Although significant industry efforts are seeking to better protect sensitive information online, existing solutions are still fragmented and far from satisfactory. Specifically, existing languages for specifying privacy policies lack a formal and unambiguous semantics, are limited in expressive power and lack enforcement as well as auditing support. Moreover, existing privacy management tools aimed at increasing end-users’ control over their privacy are limited in capability or difficult to use. This project seeks to provide a comprehensive framework for protecting online privacy, covering the entire privacy policy life cycle. This cycle includes enterprise policy creation, enforcement, analysis and auditing, as well as end user agent presentation and privacy policy processing. The project integrates privacy-relevant human, legal and economic perspectives in the proposed framework. This project will develop an expressive, semantics-based formal language for specifying privacy policies, an access control and auditing language for enforcing privacy policies in applications, as well as theory and tools for verifying privacy policies. Additionally, experiments and surveys will be conducted to better understand the axes of users’ privacy concerns and protection objectives. Results from this empirical work will be used to develop an effective paradigm for specifying privacy preferences and methods to present privacy policies to end users in an accurate and accessible way.

The primary objective of the Personal Health Record (PHR) initiative is to empower users (patients) to control their own private medical information not only in terms of management and access but also allowing the sharing of their information with others in a private, secure, and confidential environment. Generally, disclosure of personal information depends on the circumstances of access including the privacy concerns of the individual patient. In particular, for using EHR/PHR technology the overriding public concern is ensuring security and privacy of their health care information, which is a serious technological challenge for the PHR technology developer. Following are the two key barriers to a wider use of PHR.

(a) Inability of a patient to compose consistent and context-aware disclosure policies for his/her collection of Electronic Health Records (HER). These records can be maintained by various heterogeneous health care and government enterprises. The challenge is to provide an intelligent user-friendly and patient-centered environment empowering the user to control access privileges relevant to various contexts.

(b) Secure and privacy-aware interoperability and data sharing among independent healthcare enterprises. The challenge is how to ensure secure sharing of data among multiple health-care enterprises, with potentially diverse security policies and guarantee privacy-preserving data integration among such enterprises.

The objective of this project is to develop a healthcare prototype on NIST’s Policy Machine (PM) for exhibiting our newly developed context-driven policy framework. For the demo, a PHR multimedia database is being implemented which consists of text, images, audio and video data whereby fine-grained access to individual multimedia objects will be implemented based on the roles across multiple healthcare domains.

Contracted research from Lockheed Martin

This project focuses on the theoretical foundation and the protocols that facilitate a survivable information infrastructure that meets the critical requirements of a national emergency response system. Specifically, the project will address the following challenges: (1) expand the existing theoretical framework to analyze the behavior of malicious and colluding participants; (2) design and construct a scalable survivable messaging system that operates correctly under a strong adversarial model that includes insider threat and denial of service attacks; (3) design and construct information access protocols that protect against compromised database servers providing incorrect data or servers that deny access to legitimate users; and (4) prevent malicious users from learning unauthorized information. The domain of application for this work is the Clinicians’ Biodefense Network (CBN), a nationwide Internet-based information exchange system designed to provide clinicians with critical information in the aftermath of a bioterrorist attack. The CBN is designed to mitigate benign Internet faults and to resist a physical attack on one location. However, it is not able to correctly operate under a stronger threat model that includes insider attacks. Solutions for this stronger threat model are not currently available and present a major research challenge. This project will construct a prototype survivable system based on the CBN, and from it draw general principles. It will develop a solid theoretical foundation and novel system tools to facilitate building national emergency networks that are resilient against cyber-attacks in crisis situations, when those networks are most urgently needed.