Design of secure distributed medical database systems

摘要

Security is an improtant issue in health care environments wheree large amounts of highly sensitive personal data are processed.It is therefroe important that both the technical considerations and the security requireemtns (availability,integrity and confidentiality) are taken into accont 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 distribted medical database system.Them methodology is based on the combination of mandatory and discretionary security approaches and uses hieraarchies of user roles,data sets and sites in order to decide athe secure distribution of the application An edxperimental implementation of the proposed mehtodlogy in a a major Greek hospital has shown the usefulness of the proposals as well as their effectiveness in limiting the unauthorized accexsss to the medical database,without everely restricting the capabilities of the system.