Secure Access Control for Healthcare Information Systems: A Body Area Network Perspective

Body Area Network (BAN) frequently generates sensitive data that is collected by sensors and other devices. Security and privacy breaches in such mobile environments can compromise information affecting the physical health, emotional state, and financial well-being of patients. The lack of well-defined security perimeters and qualified personnel to administer security in complex environments require mechanisms capable of protecting BAN data where access depends on the credentials of the user and on the location and time of the access requests. Towards this end, we first, introduce a secure system architecture to make it possible to incorporate fine-grained information access management for BAN systems. We, then propose a Spatio-Temporal Attribute Based Access Control (STABAC) model that makes use of environmental attributes, including the location and time factors, to make access decisions. We also leverage the blockchain network to maintain policy integrity with provenance services, where the access control module verifies policy integrity from the blockchain network through smart contract services before making access decisions.