skip to main content
10.1145/1998441.1998461acmconferencesArticle/Chapter ViewAbstractPublication PagessacmatConference Proceedingsconference-collections
research-article

An approach to modular and testable security models of real-world health-care applications

Published:15 June 2011Publication History

ABSTRACT

We present a generic modular policy modelling framework and instantiate it with a substantial case study for model-based testing of some key security mechanisms of applications and services of the NPfIT. NPfIT, the National Programme for IT, is a very large-scale development project aiming to modernise the IT infrastructure of the NHS in England. Consisting of heterogeneous and distributed applications, it is an ideal target for model-based testing techniques of a large system exhibiting critical security features.

We model the four information governance principles, comprising a role-based access control model, as well as policy rules governing the concepts of patient consent, sealed envelopes and legitimate relationships. The model is given in Higher-order Logic (HOL) and processed together with suitable test specifications in the TestGen system, that generates test sequences according to them. Particular emphasis is put on the modular description of security policies and their generic combination and its consequences for model-based testing.

References

  1. American National Standard for Information Technology -- Role Based Access Control. INCITS 359--2004.Google ScholarGoogle Scholar
  2. R. Anderson. Database State. Joseph Rowntree Reform Trust Ltd, 2009. ISBN 9780954890247 (pbk.).Google ScholarGoogle Scholar
  3. C. A. Ardagna, S. D. C. di Vimercati, S. Foresti, T. W. Grandison, S. Jajodia, and P. Samarati. Access control for smarter healthcare using policy spaces. Computers & Security, 2010.Google ScholarGoogle ScholarDigital LibraryDigital Library
  4. S. Barker. The next 700 access control models or a unifying meta-model? In SACMAT, pages 187--196. ACM Press, 2009. Google ScholarGoogle ScholarDigital LibraryDigital Library
  5. M. Y. Becker. A formal security policy for an NHS electronic health record service. Technical Report UCAM-CL-TR-628, University of Cambridge, 2005.Google ScholarGoogle Scholar
  6. M. Y. Becker. Information governance in NHS's NPfIT: A case for policy specification. International Journal of Medical Informatics, 2007.Google ScholarGoogle ScholarCross RefCross Ref
  7. M. Y. Becker. and P. Sewell. Cassandra: flexible trust management, applied to electronic health records. In CSF, pages 139--154. IEEE Computer Society, 2004. Google ScholarGoogle ScholarDigital LibraryDigital Library
  8. D. E. Bell and L. J. LaPadula. Secure computer systems: A mathematical model, volume II. In Journal of Computer Security 4, pages 229--263, 1996.Google ScholarGoogle Scholar
  9. S. Brennan. The NHS IT project: the biggest computer programme in the world - ever! Radcliffe Publishing, 2005.Google ScholarGoogle Scholar
  10. A. Browne. Lives ruined as NHS leaks patients' notes. The Observer, June 25th, 2000.Google ScholarGoogle Scholar
  11. A. D. Brucker and B. Wolff. Symbolic test case generation for primitive recursive functions. In J. Grabowski and B. Nielsen, editors, FATES, number 3395 in LNCS, pages 16--32. Springer, 2004. Google ScholarGoogle ScholarDigital LibraryDigital Library
  12. A. D. Brucker and B. Wolff. Test-sequence generation with TestGen -- with an application to firewall testing. In B. Meyer and Y. Gurevich, editors, TAP, number 4454 in LNCS, pages 149--168. Springer, 2007. Google ScholarGoogle ScholarDigital LibraryDigital Library
  13. A. D. Brucker, L. Brügger, P. Kearney, and B. Wolff. Verified firewall policy transformations for test-case generation. In ICST, pages 345--354. IEEE Computer Society, 2010. Google ScholarGoogle ScholarDigital LibraryDigital Library
  14. A. D. Brucker, L. Brügger, M. P. Krieger, and B. Wolff. TestGen 1.5.0 user guide. Technical Report 670, ETH Zurich, 2010.Google ScholarGoogle Scholar
  15. A. Church. A formulation of the simple theory of types. Journal of Symbolic Logic, 5 (2): 56--68, 1940.Google ScholarGoogle ScholarCross RefCross Ref
  16. Department of Health. Confidentiality. Code of Practice, 2003.Google ScholarGoogle Scholar
  17. Department of Health. The Care Record Guarantee. Our Guarantee for NHS Care Records in England, 2009.Google ScholarGoogle Scholar
  18. Department of Health. Information Governance (IG) Concepts, 2010. http://www.connectingforhealth.nhs.uk/systemsandservices/infogov.Google ScholarGoogle Scholar
  19. D. Eyers, J. Bacon, and K. Moody. OASIS role-based access control for electronic health records. In IEEE Software, volume 153, pages 16--23. IEE, 2006.Google ScholarGoogle ScholarCross RefCross Ref
  20. H. Hu and G.-J. Ahn. Enabling verification and conformance testing for access control model. In SACMAT, pages 195--204. ACM Press, 2008. Google ScholarGoogle ScholarDigital LibraryDigital Library
  21. V. Hu, E. Martin, J. Hwang, and T. Xie. Conformance checking of access control policies specified in XACML. In COMPSAC, volume 2, pages 275--280, 2007. Google ScholarGoogle ScholarDigital LibraryDigital Library
  22. V. Hu, D. Kuhn, and T. Xie. Property verification for generic access control models. In EUC, volume 2, pages 243--250, 2008. Google ScholarGoogle ScholarDigital LibraryDigital Library
  23. A. A. E. Kalam, S. Benferhat, A. Miège, R. E. Baida, F. Cuppens, C. Saurel, P. Balbiani, Y. Deswarte, and G. Trouessin. Organization based access control. In POLICY, pages 120--131. IEEE Computer Society, 2003. Google ScholarGoogle ScholarDigital LibraryDigital Library
  24. J. Longstaff, M. Lockyer, and M. Thick. A model of accountability, confidentiality and override for healthcare and other applications. In Role-based access control, pages 71--76. ACM Press, 2000. Google ScholarGoogle ScholarDigital LibraryDigital Library
  25. E. Martin and T. Xie. Automated test generation for access control policies via change-impact analysis. In SESS, pages 5--5, 2007. Google ScholarGoogle ScholarDigital LibraryDigital Library
  26. T. Nipkow, L. C. Paulson, and M. Wenzel. Isabelle/HOL--A Proof Assistant for Higher-Order Logic, volume 2283 of phLNCS. Springer, 2002. Google ScholarGoogle ScholarDigital LibraryDigital Library
  27. OASIS. extensible access control markup language (XACML), version 2.0, 2005.Google ScholarGoogle Scholar
  28. S. L. Peyton Jones and P. Wadler. Imperative functional programming. In POPL, pages 71--84. ACM Press, 1993. Google ScholarGoogle ScholarDigital LibraryDigital Library
  29. A. Pretschner, T. Mouelhi, and Y. Le Traon. Model-based tests for access control policies. In ICST, pages 338--347. IEEE Computer Society, 2008. Google ScholarGoogle ScholarDigital LibraryDigital Library
  30. R. Sandhu, V. Bhamidipati, and Q. Munawer. The ARBAC97 model for role-based administration of roles. ACM TISSEC, 2 (1): 105--135, 1999. Google ScholarGoogle ScholarDigital LibraryDigital Library
  31. J. M. Spivey. The Z Notation: A Reference Manual. Prentice Hall, Inc., 2nd edition, 1992. Google ScholarGoogle ScholarDigital LibraryDigital Library
  32. The Caldicott Committee. Report on the Review of Patient-Identifiable Information, 1997.Google ScholarGoogle Scholar
  33. Y. L. Traon, T. Mouelhi, and B. Baudry. Testing security policies: Going beyond functional testing. In ISSRE, pages 93--102, 2007. Google ScholarGoogle ScholarDigital LibraryDigital Library

Index Terms

  1. An approach to modular and testable security models of real-world health-care applications

      Recommendations

      Comments

      Login options

      Check if you have access through your login credentials or your institution to get full access on this article.

      Sign in
      • Published in

        cover image ACM Conferences
        SACMAT '11: Proceedings of the 16th ACM symposium on Access control models and technologies
        June 2011
        196 pages
        ISBN:9781450306881
        DOI:10.1145/1998441

        Copyright © 2011 ACM

        Permission to make digital or hard copies of all or part of this work for personal or classroom use is granted without fee provided that copies are not made or distributed for profit or commercial advantage and that copies bear this notice and the full citation on the first page. Copyrights for components of this work owned by others than ACM must be honored. Abstracting with credit is permitted. To copy otherwise, or republish, to post on servers or to redistribute to lists, requires prior specific permission and/or a fee. Request permissions from [email protected]

        Publisher

        Association for Computing Machinery

        New York, NY, United States

        Publication History

        • Published: 15 June 2011

        Permissions

        Request permissions about this article.

        Request Permissions

        Check for updates

        Qualifiers

        • research-article

        Acceptance Rates

        Overall Acceptance Rate177of597submissions,30%

        Upcoming Conference

        SACMAT 2024

      PDF Format

      View or Download as a PDF file.

      PDF

      eReader

      View online with eReader.

      eReader