Browsing by Author "Ssembatya Richard"

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An Access Control Framework for Protecting Mobile Health Records: The Case Study of Developing Countries
(2012) Ssembatya Richard
Mobile health records are a good way of providing users with on-demand access to health care data. Standard approaches of securing health records include role-based access control (RBAC) because this is a flexible approach to assign permissions to a wide variety of users. However, traditional RBAC models are not designed to enforce fine-grained access control. For instance, in mobile health record systems, it is difficult to configure a policy that permits a patient to selectively share his/her personal records with healthcare workers. Therefore, defining policies that express application-level security requirements with respect to mobile records is challenging. In this paper, we present an RBAC inspired framework that provides fine-grained encryption for mobile health records where patient records have different access control policies. Our proposed framework ensures that the data can be made available securely offline. This approach can leverage systems where information needs to be shared securely under constraints of energy and/or Internet coverage.
Diversity in Security Environments: The Why and the Wherefore
(Uganda Martyrs University, 2014) Ssembatya Richard; Kayem Anne V. D. M.; Burke Mark-John
Information security is generally discussed in terms of preventing adversarial access to applications and to the data these applications handle. The authors note, however, that increasingly, creating information security solutions that are based on the difficulty of discovering the solution is no longer a truly viable approach. Some of the reasons for this include the increasing availability of faster processing power, high-performance computing systems, and big data availability. On the opposite end, issues such as frequent power outages in resource-constrained environments make applying standard security schemes challenging. In this chapter, the authors discuss examples that highlight the challenges of applying conventional security solutions to constrained resource environments. They postulate that effective security solutions for these environments require rather unconventional approaches to security-solution design. Such solutions would need to take into consideration environmental and behavioral factors in addition to drawing inspiration in certain cases from natural or biological processes.
On the Challenge of Adopting Standard EHR Systems in Developing Countries
(2013) Ssembatya Richard; Kayem Anne; Gary Marsden
Electronic health record (EHR) systems are a popular mechanism for accessing health records in the developed world and have contributed towards improved and cost-effective health care management. However, the development of appropriate and scalable EHR systems in developing countries has been difficult to achieve because of certain limitations inherent in the technological infrastructure. In this paper, we present a comparative study of 19 EHR systems in terms of the security and usability of these systems within the context of the developing world. Our aim was to investigate whether online health services designed for developed countries can be adopted for EHR systems in developing countries. The investigation was based on a number of dimensions such as development environment, system platform, type and access control standards found in the National Institute for Standard and Technology (NIST) and Certification Commission for Health Information Technology (CCHIT). Our research indicates that all the systems evaluated require online access control decisions. Solely relying on an online access control system is limiting, particularly in developing countries where access to the server can be disrupted by a number of disastrous events.