Interoperability among healthcare organizations acting as certification authorities.

One of the main problems in public key infrastructures (PKI) is currently the lack of interoperability at international level, which is greatly dependent on the automation of the cross-certification procedure using certificate policies (CP). This paper addresses the aforementioned need by presenting a method for the automated development and comparison of CPs, with main emphasis on healthcare environments. The basic elements of this method include standardization of the CP content for healthcare, a prototype decision-making algorithm for CPs comparison, representation of CPs in extensible markup language, as well as a JAVA-based CP comparison tool.

Enriching healthcare applications with cryptographic mechanisms and XML- based security services.

The paper presents the enrichment of an existing e-referral / e-prescription application within a Regional Healthcare Information Network with security functionality, solving current authentication, integrity, non-repudiation and confidentiality issues and thus significantly enhancing the overall system security, operability, applicability and user acceptance. The application makes use of an underlying PKI framework, in order to provide strong authentication, digital signature, encryption and time-stamping services. XML is used for the representation of the healthcare data itself, the encrypted form of this data, as well as the relevant data security information, following W3C standards.

Secure medical digital libraries.

In this paper, a secure medical digital library is presented. It is based on the CORBA specifications for distributed systems. The described approach relies on a three-tier architecture.

A secure Web-based medical digital library architecture based on TTPs.

In this paper, a secure medical digital library architecture is presented, that is based on the CORBA specifications for distributed systems. Special attention is given to the distinguished nature of medical data, whose integrity and confidentiality should be preserved at all costs. This is achieved through the employment of Trusted Third Parties (TTP) technology for the support of the required security services.