OFELIA – A Secure Mobile Attribute Aggregation Infrastructure for User-Centric Identity Management

Abstract

Abstract. Personal mobile devices with real practical computational power and Internet connectivity are currently widespread throughout all levels of society. This is so much so that the most popular of these devices, the smart phone, in all its varied ubiquitous manifestations is nowadays the de facto personal mobile computing platform, be it for civil or even military applications. In parallel with these developments, Internet application providers like Google and Facebook are developing and deploying an ever increasing set of personal services that are being aggregated and structured over personal user accounts were an ever increasing set of personal private sensitive attributes is being massively aggregated. In this paper we describe OFELIA (Open Federated Environment for Leveraging of Identity and Authorization), a framework for user centric identity management that provides an identity/authorization versatile infrastructure that does not depend upon the massive aggregation of users identity attributes to offer a versatile set of identity services. In OFELIA personal attributes are distributed among and protected by several otherwise unrelated AAs (Attribute Authorities). Only the user mobile device knows how to aggregate these scattered AAs identity attributes back into some useful identifiable entity identity. Moreover by recurring to an IdB (Identity Broker), acting as a privacy enhancing blind caching-proxy, in OFELIA the identity attributes location in the Internet is hidden from the RP/SP (Relying Party, Service Provider) that wants to have temporary access to the users personal data. The mobile device thus becomes the means by which the user can asynchronously exercise discretionary access control over their most sensitive dynamic identity attributes in a simple but highly transparent way.

Can Transparency Enhancing Tools Support Patient’s Accessing Electronic Health Records?

“…In this integrated view, a patient can select a part of his/her EHR and view in more detail who is accessing it and for what purpose. An example of such a tool was proposed in [20] and its security and privacy requirements have already been studied on previous research [21] [22]. Even less seems to exist about transparency and privacy in EHR.…”

“…In access control, obligations can be performed on a GRANT or DENY of an access request, for example, when a BTG is requested, an obligation can be triggered to send an email to the responsible authority to check whether that BTG access was valid or not; AUTH: European Directives [1] state that there needs to be a description of how personal data must be collected and processed. Regarding access control, this data can refer to patient's identification and authentication information (e.g., including patient's credentials for authentication and authorisation); SECAUTH: Secure authentication mechanisms with unique identification cards and one time passwords as well as secure authentication and authorization features are proposed in [21];…”

Envisioning secure and usable access control for patients

“…Architecturally, PACVIM integrates with OFELIA (Open Federated Environments Leveraging Identity and Authorization), a prototype system to perform registration, authentication and authorisation to EHRs [16]. From the human interaction's point of view, PACVIM uses visual access control tools commonly employed nowadays to browse social networks.…”

A Mobile-Based Attribute Aggregation Architecture for User-Centric Identity Management

“…Therefore providing a practical solution for the users Internet reachability challenge [8]. The use of smartphones for identity management is currently also recognized as essential for enhancing security and privacy [9,10,11] and has been proved to play a crucial role on more flexible user-centric models [12,13]. Based on these facts, the proposed architecture adopt the use of smartphones as an Authorization Broker in order to grant users a dynamic and more active role over their identity attributes.…”

“…These authorization take the form of conditional, temporal limited and easily revocable by the data owners. [7,13] …”