For healthcare, the constantly increasing digitalization, the digital preservation and use of sensitive data, the introduction of cloud computing and decentralized architectures, as well as the booming market of mobile and wearable devices, come along with the cost of proliferation of cyber-crime and the creation of malicious applications. In addition, during the last decade, we witness a considerable increase of citizen’s mobility in Europe for education, training, working and touristic purposes due to the affordable travel costs driven by low-cost airlines. Travellers suffering from chronic diseases are facing obstacles when travelling either within or outside their country of residence. Moreover, increasing mobility of patients is an important feature for independent living along the lines of active and healthy ageing.
KONFIDO aims at facilitating EU citizens to travel within Europe by allowing the widespread eHealth deployment and the secure exchange of Patient Summary and ePrescription among cross-border health systems.
KONFIDO advances the state of the art of eHealth technology with respect to four key dimensions of digital security, namely: data preservation, data access and modification, data exchange, and interoperability and compliance. To address the challenges of secure storage and exchange of eHealth data, protection and control over personal data, and security of health-related data gathered by mobile devices, KONFIDO takes a holistic approach – i.e. one targeting all the architectural layers of an IT infrastructure, and specifically: storage, dissemination, processing, and presentation. KONFIDO builds on and extends the results of a best of breed selection of successful projects, notably epSOS, STORK, DECIPHER, EXPAND, and ANTILOPE. The approach is implemented in a technological framework that relies on six technology pillars:
1) Security extensions provided by main CPU vendors;
2) Security solutions based on photonic technologies;
3) Homomorphic encryption mechanisms;
4) Customised eIDAS-compliant eID support;
5) Customized extensions of selected SIEM solutions; and
6) Disruptive logging and auditing mechanisms based on blockchain.
The usability of the proposed solutions will be tested in a realistic setup, deployed on top of a federated cloud infrastructure, where data will be exchanged and services interoperate cross-border. Experimental evidence will be collected, proving that KONFIDO solutions provide effective protection even against attacks by privileged software (e.g. the Operating System or the Hypervisor) or privileged users (e.g. the System Administrator or the Cloud Provider). KONFIDO has a dramatic potential in terms of innovation in the field of coordinated care towards improved quality of healthcare solutions since it builds on results that are already widely accepted and relies on a handful of complementary technologies (some of which are already at a high level of maturity).
