dokspot - Securely Linking Healthcare Products with Online Instructions

摘要

Printed instructions for products get replaced more and more by digital versions that are made available over the Internet. In safety-sensitive fields, such as healthcare products, availability and integrity of these instructions is of highest importance. However, providing and managing instructions online opens the door to a wide range of potential attacks, which may negatively affect availability and integrity. In this paper, dokspot is presented, which is an Internet-based service that aims at solving this problem by securely linking healthcare products with online instructions. The key to achieve this is a sophisticated security architecture and the focus of this paper is on the core components of this architecture. This includes a secure workflow to manage online instructions, which prevents, e.g., attacks by malicious insiders. Also, the traditionally monolithic web application architecture was split into role-based microservices, which provides protection even if parts of the system are compromised. Furthermore, digital signatures are utilized to continuously safeguard the lifecycle of online instructions to guarantee their genuineness and integrity. And finally, a passwordless signature scheme is introduced to hide inconvenient extra steps from the users while still maintaining security. Overall, this security architecture makes dokspot highly resistant to a wide range of attacks.