An XML multisignature scheme

Health information systems (HIS) are often deployed with inadequate security mechanisms and with users being generally pointed out as the weakest link. The launch of the Portuguese digital national identification smart card, the citizen card (CC), with strong authentication and digital signing capabilities, represents a new and viable economic opportunity for securing a HIS and at the same time foster the creation of a much more secure national health information infrastructure. Smart cards are being deployed in healthcare in several places around the world with highly encouraging results. Major programs have already been deployed with great success, although there are some well identified issues that need to be addressed. The CC is a versatile and secure card, with the latest in encryption and tamper resistance technologies, with standard support for a public key infrastructure (PKI). We present the advantages and enumerate some of the problems of using a smart card in a HIS, as well as the CC possible contributions in this area, namely as an easy, inexpensive, widely deployed way of using current technology to protect HIS security, and ultimately patient information, while at the same time fostering the expansion and deployment of inter operable HIS. Issues are identified that will need to be resolved and a detailed plan for further work to assess the level of impact the CC can have on the national HIS is indicated.

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Securing a Health Information System with a government issued digital identification card

Design and implementation of a fine-grained menu control processor for web-based information systems

At present, the exchange of information via Internet is widely used in electronic government (e-Government). To securely and effectively exchange offi- cial documents among government agencies, an exchange model has been devel- oped by the government of Taiwan. Although a RSA cryptosystem is used in the model to ensure security and XML is employed to increase interoperability, the cur- rent design does not take advantage of the rich structure of the XML documents, and it may result in possible security leaks due to the fact that, traditionally, the whole document is signed and encrypted. Considering the characteristic that it is easy to integrate encryption, signature and access control into XML documents, a fine-grained official document exchange model for e-Government is proposed in this article. In addition, the proposed model conforms to standards such as XML Encryption and XML Signature.

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Design of a secure fine-grained official document exchange model for e-government

XML signature technology is the major approach for ensuring XML data authentication. An XML signature should satisfy multiple data authentication requirements for XML data which pass a hierarchical network of responsibilities. Through investigation, existing XML multisignature schemes can not satisfy this requirement. This paper presents a series-parallel XML multisignature scheme based on Lu?s XML multisignature scheme. In the scheme presented, signers are divided into series or parallel subgroups according to their relationship, making the multisignature process closer to a natural signature-generation process. The scheme builds an XML data integrity-checking pool to provide integrity-checking for decomposed XML data. With this integrity-checking pool, signers can check integrity without the cooperation of others checkers. Testing shows that the scheme presented has a higher efficiency than repeated DSA or RSA, and satisfies application requirements in practice.

/pdf/a-series-parallel-xml-multisignature-scheme-for-xml-data-4odjgagr3o.pdf

A series-parallel XML multisignature scheme for XML data authentication

The increasing ability to interconnect computers through internetworking, and the use of the Web, as the main means to exchange information, has sped up the development of a new class of information-centered applications focused on the dissemination of XML data. Since it is often the case that data managed by an information system are highly strategic and sensitive, a comprehensive framework for ensuring the main security properties in disseminating XML data, is needed. In our poster, we provide an overall overview of both the model and the system, provided by Author-X, for securing XML data especially conceived for push dissemination mode. Our model allows the specification of both access control and signature policies in order to require the satisfaction of confidentiality, integrity and authenticity requirements for both the receiving subjects and information owners. The Author-X system provides ad hoc techniques for enforcing the specified security policies.

L. Parasiliti Provenza

Papers

XML Security