Modelling compliance threats and security analysis of cross border health data exchange

Abstract

Digital health data is created, stored and processed in healthcare IT infrastructures. These infrastructures are the target of large-scale cyber-attacks and are found to be vulnerable, primarily for two main reasons: the heterogeneity of infrastructure and the numerous stakeholders (medical staff, managers, patients, regulators etc.). Furthermore, the stakeholders have different attitudes, skills, awareness and data handling practices that offer many opportunities for malicious activities. Healthcare in general is characterised by a multitude of regulations and adherence to them is essential to the functioning of the system. Compliance management is usually described in terms of risks and involves activities such as risk identification, assessment and treatment. Our paper conceptualises the notion of a “compliance threat” and discusses the security of cross-border health data ex-change. The paper presents the architecture of the System Security Modeller and illustrates the security risk assessment of the “break glass” scenario which requires health data communication in an emergency situation.

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Identifiers

ORCID for Stephen Phillips: orcid.org/0000-0002-7901-0839

ORCID for Brian Pickering: orcid.org/0000-0002-6815-2938

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