Design of secure distributed medical database systems

Abstract

Security is an important issue in health care environments where large amounts of highly sensitive personal data are processed. It is therefore important that both the technical considerations and the security requirements (availability, integrity and confidentiality) are taken into account as main design objectives when designing a distributed medical database system. The aim of this paper has been to describe a step-by-step methodology for the design of a secure distributed medical database system. The methodology is based on the combination of mandatory and discretionary security approaches and uses hierarchies of user roles, data sets and sites in order to decide the secure distribution of the application. An experimental implementation of the proposed methodology in a major Greek hospital has shown the usefulness of the proposals as well as their effectiveness in limiting the unauthorized access to the medical database, without severely restricting the capabilities of the system.